How 44pixels grew their subscription revenue 10x in 18 months with Adapty

44pixels was founded by Adam, Noam, and Anton — three experienced entrepreneurs. With the rise of AI, they saw an opportunity to rethink and disrupt everyday mobile apps for an AI-first world.

44pixels built Pixi first — an AI chat assistant that became their proof of concept for subscription monetization. Every paywall test, pricing experiment, and retention insight they collected went straight into building Cue. Within 12 months of launch, Cue hit tops in the Productivity category and earned App of the Day multiple times.

The company operates with a clear philosophy: understand your core competencies and double down on them. For 44pixels, that means three things — design, data, and distribution (the “3 Ds”). They believe that in a world where anyone can build the same product, taste and distribution become the differentiator.

They needed a solution that would be more than just basic infrastructure. The subscription management solution you choose shapes how you build your product: how you manage paywalls, how you handle upsells, and what premium offers you can run. Everything ties back to how your infrastructure is structured. The subscription provider becomes central to how the product works, so they carefully studied the market in search of the right partner.

44pixels spent about two months evaluating the options before making a decision. One thing that mattered to them was finding a partner who believed in their success. Adapty’s flexible approach to pricing signaled that they were willing to grow together rather than just close a deal. Having founders and a team based in Europe helped too — 44pixels found it easier to connect.

When Adam met Adapty’s founders, Vitaly and Kirill, he could tell they genuinely cared about what they were building. They had turned their idea into a real business, and that resonated with him.

Adam liked that the platform was easy to use and intuitive. That’s exactly how we envisioned Adapty: a developer-first platform with an open-source SDK, clear documentation, and fast support that speaks the same language as engineers.

Adapty became the partner that took subscription infrastructure off 44pixels’ plate — handling complex tasks like subscription logic, transaction management, receipt validation, server-side verification, and cross-platform profile management. All of these features are built into the SDK, which is simple to integrate.

But the platform’s flexibility makes Adapty more than a silent infrastructure. It’s a toolbox you can reach into whenever you need something. 44pixels takes full advantage of this.

For example, design is one of 44pixels’ core competencies, and Adapty gives them the infrastructure to move fast on it. Remote config lets them push paywall updates without an app release, and A/B testing is foolproof — pick two paywalls and hit go. It just works, and it’s quick.

Today, 44pixels has around 100 active paywalls across all its apps. At that scale, Adapty works almost like a CMS. It’s a single place to create, organize, and manage everything.

44pixels also gets a lot out of Adapty’s segmentation — starting with essentials like pricing experiments by country and app version gating. But they go further, using custom placement IDs to tailor the user journey based on context. By mapping specific placement IDs to user states, they can trigger unique paywalls for granular scenarios — such as targeting free users right after onboarding, managing upsells for trial users, or coordinating win-back campaigns via deep links.

Another important Adapty feature that’s delivering strong results is Refund Saver, which automatically disputes refund requests. In 2025, 44pixels saved over hundreds of thousands thanks to Refund Saver.

Thanks to Adapty, 44pixels removed a lot of unnecessary headaches and saved time and money — measured in opportunity cost avoided. The result: engineering time not spent on subscription infrastructure, edge cases not debugged, and API changes not tracked.

In a year and a half, 44pixels grew to 7 figures MRR without ever touching subscription infrastructure. Instead, they invested in growth, launching new apps and scaling their ideas. Speed is a defining trait for them. They started in 2024 and scaled from 2 apps in year one to 2 apps per quarter.

The 44pixels example illustrates how Adapty can fit into your product culture — and become a useful tool for the whole team. Almost everyone at 44pixels uses Adapty: product managers tweak paywalls and configs, founders track revenue and subscription dynamics, analysts validate data discrepancies and plan A/B tests, and QA tests paywalls and placements.

44pixels relies on Adapty for the critical “job to be done” — subscription stability — without letting a tool dictate their product strategy. They use the infrastructure to handle the heavy lifting, but because the platform is open and flexible, they fit it into their specific workflows, not the other way around.

This means you can be selective. If design is your differentiator (as it is for 44pixels), you can build paywalls natively while still using Adapty’s remote config to manage the logic without code. If you have a strong data team, you can export raw data to your own warehouse while using Adapty’s dashboard for quick daily health checks. It’s about having a partner that covers the foundational needs while providing modular tools you can activate whenever you need to move faster.