I spent a weekend setting up Adjust for an app that was making about £300 a month. The dashboard looked incredible. Clean graphs, cohort analysis, fraud prevention scores. I felt like a proper mobile growth team.
Then I looked at the pricing page and did the maths. The free tier had just enough limits to be frustrating, and the jump to paid was hundreds a month. More than the app was earning.
I closed the tab.
Adjust is good at what it does
Let me be clear about this. Adjust is a serious piece of software. Multi-touch attribution across ad networks, fraud prevention that catches SDK spoofing and click injection, audience builder for retargeting, SKAN conversion modelling for iOS. Their data clean room product is genuinely innovative.
If you're spending £10,000 a month on user acquisition across Meta, Google, and TikTok, Adjust earns its keep. The fraud prevention alone can save you more than the subscription costs.
But you're reading this article, which means you're probably not at that stage yet.
The small app problem
Most indie developers I've spoken to are running apps that get somewhere between 100 and 2,000 installs a month. Revenue sits in the low hundreds to maybe a couple of thousand. Marketing consists of some organic social media, maybe a small Apple Search Ads campaign, the odd Reddit post, possibly an influencer deal or two.
At that scale, the question you need answered is pretty simple. "Which of my marketing channels is actually driving purchases?" Not impressions. Not clicks. Purchases. The thing that puts money in your account.
Adjust can answer that question. So can a tool that costs 97% less. The extra features you're paying for at Adjust's price point are solving problems that don't exist yet at your scale.
Fraud prevention? You're not running enough paid campaigns for fraud to be a meaningful problem. Multi-touch attribution? You've got three channels, not thirty. Audience segmentation? You're posting on TikTok, not orchestrating a cross-network retargeting strategy.
What you actually need
After going through this cycle a few times (set up enterprise tool, realise it's overkill, rip it out), I've narrowed down what small apps genuinely need from attribution:
Per-link tracking. Create a unique link for each channel, campaign, or influencer. When someone clicks it, record where they came from.
Purchase connection. When a user makes an in-app purchase or starts a subscription, match it back to the click. This is the whole point. Not "estimated installs from this campaign" but "this specific purchase came from this specific link."
A dashboard that shows what's working. Revenue per channel. Revenue per influencer. Which campaign made money, which didn't. Simple.
That's the list. Everything else is nice to have, and "nice to have" shouldn't cost hundreds a month.
The alternatives, honestly
LinkOwl charges 5p per attributed purchase. No monthly fee. If your app has 50 purchases a month, that's £2.50. At 200 purchases, it's £10. Your attribution costs track your revenue rather than running ahead of it. It connects to RevenueCat and Superwall via webhook, so purchase matching happens automatically. The trade-off: no fraud prevention, no multi-touch models, no ad network integrations. For organic and small paid campaigns, you don't need those.
AppsFlyer's Zero plan is free up to a point. Decent for getting started, but the limits on data retention and features mean you'll hit a wall. And the jump from free to paid is steep. Same fundamental problem as Adjust.
Branch focuses on deep linking more than attribution. Their free tier is generous for links, but attribution features are behind the paywall. If you need deferred deep links and attribution in one tool, Branch is worth looking at. If you just need purchase tracking, it's more than you need.
Rolling your own with UTM parameters works for web traffic but falls apart for app installs. The App Store strips UTMs. You can track clicks to your listing page, but you lose the thread between click and purchase. Firebase helps somewhat, but stitching it all together takes real engineering time.
Singular positions itself as a cheaper Adjust/AppsFlyer competitor. It is, relatively. But "cheaper than expensive" can still be expensive for a small app.
Running the numbers
Let's make this concrete. Say your app gets 400 installs a month, 6% convert to paid. That's 24 purchases.
Adjust's paid plans start in the mid-hundreds per month. Even their most basic tier with proper attribution data will likely cost more than those 24 purchases generate.
LinkOwl at 5p per attributed purchase: £1.20 per month. Below the £5 billing threshold, so you wouldn't even be charged yet. The bill only lands when you've accumulated enough attributed purchases to cross £5.
The point isn't that one number is bigger than the other. It's that the pricing model itself is different. Flat monthly fees assume a certain scale. Per-purchase pricing adapts to whatever scale you're at.
When to upgrade to Adjust
There's a real inflection point where Adjust starts making sense. It usually looks like this:
You're spending over £5,000 a month on paid acquisition. You're buying installs through multiple ad networks. You suspect (or know) that some of your paid installs are fraudulent. Your marketing team has grown past one person and you need shared tooling. You're running enough SKAN campaigns that conversion value management matters.
When three or more of those are true, Adjust's price tag starts to look reasonable as a percentage of your marketing spend. You're buying infrastructure that protects your budget.
The mistake is buying that infrastructure before you need it, because someone on Twitter said you need "proper attribution from day one." You don't. You need attribution that matches your current scale, with a path to upgrade when you outgrow it.
The migration path
If you're starting small and want to keep your options open, the practical approach is:
Start with per-purchase attribution. Create tracked links for your channels. Connect your payment processor. See which channels drive revenue. Make marketing decisions based on real data instead of guesses.
When your paid acquisition budget grows past a few thousand a month, evaluate whether you need fraud protection and multi-network attribution. That's when the enterprise tools earn their fee.
The data you collect with a simpler tool still has value. You'll know your baseline conversion rates, your best channels, your most effective campaigns. That context makes the Adjust setup faster and more useful when you do switch, because you already know what good looks like for your app.
The honest answer
Adjust is overqualified for most small apps. That's not a criticism of Adjust. It's a recognition that tools should fit the job.
If your app makes a few hundred quid a month and you're marketing through organic channels and small campaigns, you need a bicycle, not a fighter jet. Get attribution that answers your actual question (which link drove this purchase?) at a price that tracks your revenue.
Save the enterprise tooling for when you've got an enterprise problem to solve.