The attribution SDK indie developers actually want

The problem we kept hearing

Before Attribr, I spent a lot of time in Discord servers and indie Slack groups. The same conversation kept coming up. Developers would say something like: "I need to know where my installs are coming from, but I can't justify paying £200 a month for AppsFlyer when I'm getting 5,000 installs a month." Or they'd say they'd integrated Branch, only to watch their app launch time creep up by 200ms. Or they'd ask whether they should even bother with attribution at all since iOS 14.5 broke everything.

These weren't theoretical problems. They were real friction points for real people building real apps. The existing solutions were either too heavy, too expensive, or designed for scale that doesn't exist at the indie level. Enterprise attribution SDKs come with enterprise assumptions: that you have a mobile analytics team, that you're running multiple ad networks, that launch speed isn't your top concern.

We decided to build for the inverse. What if we designed for the developer who cares deeply about those milliseconds, who's running on a shoestring budget, and who wants answers without complexity?

Keeping it genuinely small

The 50KB SDK size wasn't arbitrary. We spent weeks stripping out everything that wasn't essential. No third-party dependencies. No frameworks bolted on. That was the rule. Every decision after that flowed from it.

When you're indie, 200KB of extra code matters. It matters for download size on slow connections. It matters for cold start time on older devices. It matters for your build size budget. We've all been there: you integrate some library and suddenly your app is 10MB heavier.

The sub-50ms launch overhead came from the same philosophy. We benchmarked ruthlessly. Some of our beta testers actually ran load tests on their own devices to make sure we weren't lying. (We weren't.) That kind of transparency builds trust faster than any testimonial ever could.

Three lines of integration in Swift or Kotlin. That's it. No configuration files. No delegate patterns spread across your AppDelegate. You call it, it works, it stays out of your way.

What you actually need to know

Here's the uncomfortable truth about indie attribution: you don't need to know everything. You need to know three things. Where did each install come from? Are those users still around at day 7, day 14, day 30? And if you're using Rippl for performance marketing, which promoter drove that install?

Everything else in Attribr serves one of those three questions. The dashboard shows you cohort breakdowns, retention curves, and funnel data. Simple charts. Real numbers. No vanity metrics.

The deterministic plus probabilistic matching means we can figure out your installs even without ATT permission. iOS 14.5 changed the landscape, but it didn't change the problem. We still need answers. The matching works because it's pragmatic, not because it's magic. You get attribution that's honest about its own uncertainty.

For developers running CPI campaigns through Rippl, there's something unique here. We built a direct bridge between Attribr and Rippl so you can see exactly which promoter drove an install and how long that user stuck around. That connection doesn't exist anywhere else. It matters when your entire distribution strategy lives inside one platform.

The pricing conversation

We wanted Attribr to be accessible when you're small, and scale with you as you grow. The free tier gives you 1,000 installs a month. That's not a toy number; that's enough to validate whether attribution even matters for your business.

Growth is £29 a month for 25,000 installs. Pro is £99 a month for 100,000. At that point, you're running a real business, and Pro adds fraud signals and ad-network roll-ups if you need that visibility.

We're not competing with Adjust or AppsFlyer at enterprise scale. We're not trying to. They have use cases and teams and budgets that live in a different world. Attribr is for the developer who builds in her spare time and maybe thinks about growth next year. It's for the small studio that just shipped their second game. It's for people who want better data without needing a finance committee to approve the spend.

Why this matters beyond the SDK

Building Attribr forced us to think differently about what an indie developer actually wants. Not sophistication for sophistication's sake. Not features that sound impressive in a sales call. Real utility. Real clarity. Real respect for their time and money.

That developer in Cape Town who integrated in eleven minutes? She's representative of who we're building for. She's not going to read a 50-page integration guide. She doesn't want to debug third-party dependencies. She wants her attribution question answered so she can go back to the actual work of making her app better.

We've tried to make every decision in Attribr reflect that. The small SDK size. The minimal dependencies. The honest dashboard. The Rippl bridge that saves you from juggling platforms. Even the pricing feels aligned with what we think indie development is actually about: doing excellent work without needing venture capital or a nine-figure budget.