In his search for an undergraduate research position, Jacob Eiting downloaded the email directory for his university's physics department and messaged thirty professors. He received just two responses and a single offer. While Eiting studied physics, he viewed computing primarily as a personal hobby. The lab position, however, required him to write Python control software for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), an advanced astronomical instrument designed to take procedural images of deep space for cosmological research.
Control Code for a Dark Energy Camera
The DECam software architecture was split across multiple academic institutions. One university developed the shutter control software, another built the camera readout systems, and other teams created specialized modules. Eiting was responsible for writing control code to make these separate software components work together seamlessly. Coordinating code built by independent university teams proved to be a chaotic lesson in software integration and project sheepherding, steering him away from pure academia toward software engineering.
The 2008 App Store Pivot
When Apple introduced the iPhone App Store in 2008, Eiting shifted his focus away from physics research entirely. He began building mobile software and launched one of the first 200 applications on Apple's new platform. Years later, while working on the mobile brain-training application Elevate, Eiting ran into a persistent backend bottleneck. Apple had recently introduced recurring subscriptions for mobile applications, but managing the underlying data was unexpectedly cumbersome. While Eiting's team spent one year building the core Elevate application, they were forced to spend the next three years building custom backend infrastructure just to process, enrich, and track subscriber data.
Platform Blind Spots and Cross-Platform Friction
The engineering friction stemmed from strict platform restrictions imposed by mobile operating system creators. Apple withheld critical payment details from app developers, including subscriber identities, transaction locations, and exact payment amounts due to platform privacy policies. Google maintained its own distinct rules for what transaction data was exposed or obscured. For cross-platform software running on both iOS and Android, reconciling these different data streams into coherent analytics required complex custom plumbing. Because payment processing felt distant from core application features, most development teams under-invested in this infrastructure, leaving developers with incomplete business insights.
Whiteboards and 30,000 Applications
Recognizing that mobile developers across the industry faced the exact same payment plumbing challenge, Eiting decided to address it with a dedicated platform. He reached out to his former Elevate colleague Miguel. Eiting visited Miguel's house and pitched the idea over a whiteboard session, mapping out a unified software development kit and API that could manage subscriptions, customer data, and in-app paywalls across both major mobile platforms.
They founded RevenueCat and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 accelerator batch to turn the whiteboard concept into scalable developer infrastructure.
Seven years after participating in Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, RevenueCat provides in-app subscription management, paywall experimentation, and revenue analytics for over 30,000 mobile applications. By turning a frustrating, repetitive backend obstacle into standardized SDK tooling, the platform allows developer teams to skip years of infrastructure building and focus directly on their own core products.
AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
Source: The origins of RevenueCat
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