The three questions every small studio needs answered
Six months ago, a developer emailed me from her bedroom studio in Manchester. She'd shipped a puzzle game, watched it climb to 2,000 installs in week one, and realised she had no idea which of her five marketing channels was actually working. She'd looked at Branch and AppsFlyer. Both would cost her £200 a month minimum. She made £300 that week total. That email is why Attribr exists.
Starting with the real problem
Here's the thing about being a small studio: you're not running a complex marketing machine. You're probably trying three or four things at once. Maybe you posted on Reddit. You paid for some TikTok ads. A friend shared your game on Discord. A micro influencer covered it. And then installs come in. But you don't know which channel is actually converting real, engaged players.
The big attribution tools solve a different problem. They're built for teams with marketing operations people, budgets in the millions, and complex partner ecosystems. They're brilliant at that. But they're also overkill if you're trying to answer three simple questions: where did this install come from, is that user still playing at day 7, and if I worked with a creator through Rippl, which one actually delivered?
We built Attribr to answer those three questions and nothing else. No unnecessary complexity. No you-need-enterprise-support pricing model.
Why the SDK itself matters
When we started building, we made an architectural choice that turned out to be more important than I initially thought. The SDK is 50KB. It has zero third-party dependencies. It adds less than 50 milliseconds to your launch time. Most developers don't notice it exists.
I mention this because it reflects a real belief about small studios: your game or app should be fast. Your code should be simple. You shouldn't need to trust five different vendors just to measure where a user came from. We ship a self-contained piece of code that does one job well, and you keep everything else in your control.
The integration is three lines of Swift or Kotlin. Not three pages of documentation. Three lines. I've watched developers set it up in five minutes on a Friday afternoon while eating a sandwich.
Retention: the metric that actually matters
Attribution is only half the story. You need to know if those installs stick around. Are they playing on day 7? Day 14? Day 30? If a channel is driving a thousand installs but nobody comes back, that channel is burning your budget, not building your game.
Attribr tracks cohort retention automatically. You can see your retention curves broken down by channel. So you might discover that TikTok is your volume channel but your Reddit posts are bringing in the players who actually return. That's the insight that changes where you focus.
A studio in Berlin tested this with their casual game. They'd been assuming their paid ads were working because the install numbers looked good. The retention data showed the opposite: organic installs had 40% day 7 retention; paid installs were closer to 12%. They shifted their budget that week. Very different outcome from what they would have guessed.
The iOS privacy situation, solved
iOS 14.5 broke most attribution. Developers suddenly couldn't get permission to track users reliably. For studios with real budgets, the big tools leaned into workarounds and fingerprinting. For small studios, it felt like attribution just became unavailable.
Attribr works without ATT permission by combining deterministic matching (you can match installs if the user logs in, for example) with probabilistic matching based on observable signals. It's not magic. It's not a fingerprint trawled from dozens of data points. It's pattern matching on the data you legitimately have access to. It works. And it's transparent about what it's doing.
The second layer is Rippl. If you're working with creators or marketers through the Rippl platform, those users carry a direct attribution token. You know exactly which promoter drove the install. No guessing. No probabilistic fallback.
What happens when you actually use it
The dashboard is built around the same philosophy as the SDK. It's clean. It shows you what matters: where installs came from, retention curves by source, and if you're using Rippl, a direct view of which promoters are driving engagement. You can break down retention by cohort and by funnel if you want to go deeper. But you don't have to.
We keep the free tier at 1,000 installs a month so you can test it properly before you commit. Growth tier covers up to 25,000 installs. Pro covers 100,000. If you're running a studio that's bigger than that, you're probably ready for something more complex anyway, and that's okay. We're not trying to be everything. We're trying to be the thing small studios actually need.
The thing I didn't expect was how many developers just... stayed. They hit 1,000 installs, signed up for Growth, and kept using it. Not because they felt trapped, but because the data was actually useful and they weren't paying enterprise pricing for it.
If you're building a game or app and you genuinely don't know which of your marketing efforts are working, or if you've looked at the big tools and wondered if there was something lighter, what's stopping you from knowing where your best users actually come from?