I was comparing attribution tools last year and kept hitting the same wall. Every tool I looked at wanted a monthly fee. Not a small one, either. AppsFlyer starts around $500/month. Adjust is similar. Branch has a free tier but the useful features are locked behind enterprise pricing.
For an app making £300 a month, these numbers are absurd. You'd spend more tracking your sales than you'd make from them.
The subscription problem
Traditional attribution tools price by install volume or monthly flat rate. That model works fine if you're Spotify or Deliveroo. You've got a marketing team, a six-figure ad budget, and the margins to absorb tool costs.
But most apps aren't Spotify. Most apps are one person, maybe two, trying to figure out whether their TikTok posts or Reddit comments are driving more purchases. The question is simple. The tools available to answer it are not.
Here's what happens in practice. You sign up for a free trial of some attribution platform. You spend a weekend integrating their SDK, reading docs written for marketing teams of 15, configuring postbacks you don't need. Then the trial ends and you're looking at $200/month minimum.
So you cancel. And you go back to guessing.
What pay-per-sale attribution looks like
The concept is straightforward. Instead of paying a fixed monthly fee regardless of results, you pay a small amount per attributed sale. No sale, no charge.
This means attribution costs scale with your revenue, not ahead of it. When you're making 10 sales a month, you pay almost nothing. When you're making 10,000, you pay more — but you can obviously afford to, because you're making 10,000 sales.
It also means there's no awkward conversation with yourself about whether the tool is "worth it" this month. The tool earns its keep on every transaction.
Why hasn't this existed before?
Good question. The enterprise attribution companies have no incentive to price this way. Their customers have budgets and procurement processes. Flat-rate pricing is predictable, which finance teams love. And honestly, charging by install volume at scale is extremely profitable.
The indie developer market was too small and fragmented for these companies to care about. Nobody was going to rebuild an MMP for apps doing £500/month in revenue.
But the indie app market has changed. Tools like VibeCode, Cursor, and Rork Max mean people are shipping apps faster than ever. The number of small, revenue-generating apps has exploded. And all those developers have the same question: where are my sales coming from?
How it works in practice
The setup is simpler than you'd expect because the scope is narrower. Enterprise attribution tools track everything — installs, in-app events, re-engagement, fraud signals, deep link routing, deferred deep linking, web-to-app flows, cross-device graphs. Most indie devs need one thing: which link drove this purchase?
Here's the typical flow:
- You create a tracked link for each marketing channel or campaign
- Someone clicks the link and installs your app
- When they make a purchase, the attribution system matches it back to the original link
- You see which channels are actually generating revenue, not just clicks
That's it. No postbacks to configure. No attribution windows to debate. No incrementality models to run.
The maths at different scales
Let's say attribution costs 5p per attributed sale. Here's how that looks:
10 sales/month: 50p total. Essentially free.
100 sales/month: £5 total. Less than a coffee subscription.
1,000 sales/month: £50 total. At this point your app is doing well and £50 is a rounding error.
10,000 sales/month: £500 total. Comparable to what you'd pay for AppsFlyer — but you only got here because you could afford it.
Compare that to a flat $200/month tool. At 10 sales, you're paying £20 per attributed sale. At 100 sales, you're paying £2 each. The flat-rate model punishes small apps and rewards large ones. Pay-per-sale does the opposite.
What you lose compared to enterprise tools
Let's be honest about trade-offs. Pay-per-sale attribution tools aimed at indie developers typically don't include:
Fraud detection. If you're spending £50/month on ads, ad fraud isn't your biggest problem. It matters when you're spending £50,000/month.
Multi-touch attribution models. First-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay — these matter when you've got 8 marketing channels running simultaneously. If you've got 3 TikTok links and a Reddit link, first-click attribution tells you what you need to know.
Cross-device graphing. The ability to track a user across their phone, tablet, and desktop. Useful for enterprise. Overkill for a toothbrush timer app.
Dedicated account managers. If you need a human to walk you through setup, enterprise tools provide that. But you probably don't — you built the app, you can read docs.
What you keep
The one thing that actually matters: knowing which marketing link drove each purchase. Everything else is noise at the indie scale.
You also keep your margins. That's the real point. Attribution should be a tool that helps you make better decisions, not a cost centre that eats into thin profits.
When to upgrade to enterprise tools
There's a natural graduation point. When your app is doing thousands of sales a month, running paid campaigns across multiple channels, and you need to optimise spend at the margin level — that's when AppsFlyer or Adjust earn their fee.
But that's a nice problem to have. And you won't get there by flying blind. You'll get there because you used lightweight attribution to figure out which channels work, doubled down on them, and grew.
Getting started
If you're running a small app and want to know where your sales come from, the setup takes about 10 minutes:
- Sign up for a pay-per-sale attribution tool (like LinkOwl)
- Add the SDK to your app — there are packages for Swift, React Native, and Expo
- Create tracked links for each marketing channel
- Connect your payment provider (RevenueCat, Superwall, or StoreKit directly)
- Start seeing which links actually drive purchases
No contracts. No minimum spend. No monthly fee sitting there whether you make sales or not.
The best attribution tool for a small app isn't the most powerful one. It's the one you can actually afford to use.