Using RevenueCat without the SDK
If you want to use RevenueCat without the SDK, you need to send all of the receipts and/or purchase tokens to RevenueCat via the POST /receipts REST API endpoint. This will create the customer in RevenueCat, RevenueCat will validate the purchase and keep the purchase status up-to-date.
You can always start with a server-side integration without the SDK, and add the SDK later. In the case where purchases are made through the SDK and also sent on the server side, RevenueCat will automatically deduplicate them, so there is no risk in this approach.
Using RevenueCat Data and Integration Features
All RevenueCat data and integration features, including charts, customer history, purchase lifecycle events, webhooks, integrations with third party tools, and scheduled data exports work without integrating the SDK. RevenueCat's data features provide data at a higher level of granularity than the reports available from the app stores directly, allow tying data directly to your customer's profiles, and allow syncing this data to your own backend or data warehouse or to third party tools.
One important factor to decide before integrating RevenueCat is what to use as the customer identity, also referred to as App User ID. If you are already using a unique app user ID in your backend, it is often best to use this for RevenueCat as well. Otherwise, RevenueCat can generate anonyomous App User IDs for you; however, you won't be able to link customer identity across different tools that way.
If you are planning on using RevenueCat integrations with third party tools, please note that some of them require special customer identifiers. These are generally using specific RevenueCat customer attributes that will need to be set via the REST API. You can find information about the required customer attributes in the documentation for the respective third-party integration.
Read more about identifying customers →
Using RevenueCat for Subscription and Entitlement Status
Even if you don't use the SDK, you can use RevenueCat as your source of the truth for subscription and entitlement status. To do so, start by setting up products and entitlements in RevenueCat, and then use the GET /subscribers/{app_user_id} REST API endpoint to access information about a customer's subscriptions, purchases, and entitlements.
Alternatively, if you prefer to keep a copy of a customer's purchase and entitlement status in your own database, you can also listen to RevenueCat's webhooks to update your database whenever there is a new or updated purchase.