How Hily lifted ARPU by ~20% on its iOS US segment with Solidgate
~20%ARPU lift
100%iOS US audience on direct billing
~4 weeksTime to production
Industry
Dating appsRegion
United StatesUse case
App2web direct billing, subscription migration from App StoreFeatures used
Orchestration, acquiring, subscription billing, chargeback alertsAt a glance
is one of the largest consumer dating apps in the US, built around smart matchmaking and a freemium subscription model. Since launch, the app has grown into a top player in social discovery, with a recurring-revenue base that runs on Hily Premium subscriptions and in-app purchases.
For years, 100% of that subscription revenue flowed through the Apple Store, which worked at the early stage. It stopped working once user acquisition costs started climbing and the 30% platform fee turned into a structural drag on unit economics.
Hily's team decided to build a direct billing channel – app2web – that could run alongside store billing and eventually replace it on iOS. They needed a payments partner who could stand up the full infrastructure on day one: tokenization, acquiring, subscription logic, and the orchestration to make it all perform.
Here's how Solidgate helped Hily make direct billing available to 100% of its US iOS subscribers in about four weeks, and lift ARPU ~20% on that segment.
The challenge: breaking out of store billing without losing economics
Hily's problem wasn't a payment problem in the usual sense. They didn't have declining approval rates or a messy multi-PSP stack. They had no payment stack at the time, and every subscriber renewal was handled by Apple.
Moving off-store meant building the payment layer from scratch, and doing it well enough that the new channel would outperform the old one on renewals, not just on fees.
Three things had to be solved at the same time.
A 30% platform fee that scaled with the business
Every iOS subscription carried up to 30% in Apple Store commission. At early stage, that was a cost of doing business. At Hily's scale, with rising UA costs and a maturing market, it had become the single biggest drag on unit economics, compounding with every new cohort.
The team needed a way to keep the subscriber and recover the margin, without disrupting the experience that had made the product work in the first place.
Zero control over card credentials and subscriber data
Under store billing, every card credential lived on Apple's side. Hily had no token vault, no subscriber-level payment data, and no way to run retries, update expired cards, or adapt renewal logic to performance signals. If Apple declined a renewal, the subscriber churned, and Hily had no tools to recover them.
For a subscription business where LTV is built renewal by renewal, that wasn't a cost center. It was a blind spot.
No direct billing stack to migrate to
Moving to app2web meant Hily needed the whole stack at once: PCI-compliant tokenization, a checkout flow tuned for mobile web, acquirer relationships in the US and Europe, cascade and retry logic for MIT renewals, AMEX support, chargeback alerts, and the reporting to tie it all together. Building each piece separately and integrating them would take quarters. Hily needed it in weeks.
What they needed from a partner was simple to state and hard to deliver – a single integration that covered acquiring, subscription billing, and orchestration, stood up fast, and performed from the first renewal.
The solution: one integration, full stack, live in a few weeks
Solidgate gave Hily the direct billing infrastructure they were missing, wrapped in a single API. Orchestration sat at the center, with acquiring, subscription logic, and value-added services plugged in underneath.
Multi-acquirer setup, orchestrated from day one
Renewals in a subscription business are a volume game. Small differences in approval rates compound into meaningful ARPU differences over a cohort's lifetime.
We launched Hily with a multi-acquirer setup in the US from day one, including Tier-1 acquirers like WorldPay, so every renewal had more than one path to approval.
picked the best rail per transaction. Payment cascading caught declines and retried them on a secondary acquirer before the subscriber ever knew there was an issue. The result: no single point of failure, and room to tune routing logic as performance data came in.
AMEX coverage for the US dating segment
AMEX adoption skews high in US consumer subscription categories, and dating is no exception. We turned on AMEX support as part of the same integration, closing a scheme gap that would have otherwise capped Hily's addressable subscriber base on direct billing.
Subscription billing and chargeback protection
handled the MIT (Merchant-Initiated Transaction) logic for recurring renewals – retry schedules, dunning, and smart recovery on failed charges. On top of that, we turned on chargeback so disputes could be resolved before they escalated into hard chargebacks.
The rollout
Hily didn't flip a switch. They ran an A/B test on a small, loyal iOS segment first, measured the economics, and expanded from there – cohort by cohort – until direct billing was available to 100% of their US iOS audience. Total time from first contact to production: about four weeks. Full US iOS rollout completed shortly after.
What changed: ~20% ARPU lift on the iOS US segment
With the direct billing channel live, Hily's US iOS economics shifted materially. The lift came from two places: better renewal performance, thanks to orchestration and smart retries, and lower fees, thanks to moving off the 30% store commission.
- ~20% ARPU lift on the US iOS segment, driven by higher renewal rates and lower commission costs versus store billing.
- Direct billing is available to 100% of the US iOS audience after a cohort-by-cohort rollout that started with a controlled A/B test.
- Live in a few weeks from first contact to production – one integration covering orchestration, acquiring, subscription billing, and alerts.
- Multi-acquirer setup in production, including WorldPay US and PayPal, with cascading and smart routing active from day one, and additional acquiring infrastructure currently in rollout.
- Full ownership of the token vault and subscriber data, giving Hily its own retry logic, renewal tuning, and reporting for the first time.
With iOS US proven out, Hily is now expanding the same setup to Android, unlocking the same economics across the rest of its subscriber base. They’re building toward their next GMV scale target with AMEX onboarding and additional optimizations already on the roadmap.
to see what Solidgate can do for your subscription business.