RevenueCat vs BigQuery
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Stretching from subscription infrastructure into hybrid subs+ads revenue tracking, with paywalls getting smarter.
RevenueCat is broadening from subscription-only to subscription-plus-ads with in-app ad revenue tracking now in public beta — apps using AdMob or AppLovin can send ad events through the SDK and see ad and sub revenue side by side. Paywalls have gained meaningful logic depth (Paywall Rules to show/hide components by intro-offer eligibility or custom variables) and the iOS/Android fallback paywall now auto-styles using the app icon's dominant color. Operational tooling has caught up: archived offerings/products/entitlements, OAuth token visibility and revocation, predicted-LTV winners in Experiments.
The product is moving from 'subscription billing infra' to 'mobile monetization platform.' Ad revenue tracking is the headline because it changes who RevenueCat is for — every freemium app with mixed monetization, not just sub-driven apps. Paywall Rules suggest the company is going deeper on the merchandising layer rather than ceding it to MMP-adjacent tools. The Experiments-side LTV predictions and locale-aware paywalls signal continued investment in the optimization story.
Expect the in-app ad revenue beta to GA with deeper SDK support for more ad networks, more sophisticated Paywall Rules conditions (likely user-segment and behavioral triggers), and tighter Experiments + ad-revenue correlation as customers compare hybrid monetization mixes.
BigQuery doubles down on Iceberg, graph, and global data sharing as the lakehouse fight intensifies.
BigQuery's May 2026 ship list is dominated by three tracks: open-format lakehouse integration (Iceberg v3 with deletion vectors, REST catalog support in Conversational Analytics), graph capabilities maturing inside BigQuery Studio, and global data exchange via multi-region sharing listings reaching GA. Alongside the feature work, Google is tightening Data Transfer Service security (MFA on Google Ads transfers) and warning about Ads retention changes that will cap historical backfills from June 1. The release notes show a mature warehouse continuing to absorb adjacent workloads rather than reinventing itself.
BigQuery is positioning itself as the federated query and sharing fabric for a multi-format world, with Iceberg getting closer to first-class status and Conversational Analytics extending across external catalogs. The graph and notebook work signals a push to keep more analytical work inside Studio instead of bouncing to specialized tools. Expect continued layering of governance, AI-assisted query, and open-table support on top of the existing engine rather than core engine reinvention.
Next obvious step is GA for Iceberg v3 features and full conversational graph querying without Preview gating. Watch for additional first-party data sources getting MFA mandates, mirroring the Google Ads tightening.
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