The afternoon I stopped paying Adjust

The moment he realised he didn't need the enterprise plan

His games were doing well. Not venture-backed well, but real indie success. Fifteen thousand installs a month across two titles. Good retention cohorts. Growing word-of-mouth. The kind of studio that makes sustainable income without needing to scale to millions of users overnight.

But he was paying for Adjust Pro. £99 a month. Or more, depending on the tier. He had access to features he never touched: white-label dashboards, team seats, API endpoints for custom reporting. His team was two people. He used a spreadsheet for most decisions.

When I asked why he hadn't switched earlier, he said the friction cost felt real. Attribution SDKs aren't the sort of thing you rip out on a whim. You integrate them at launch, embed them in your build pipeline, trust them for months. Switching means testing, validation, and the risk that something breaks.

That's when I showed him the integration docs for Attribr. Three lines in Swift. Three lines in Kotlin. He read them once. Built it. Ran a test. Done.

What he actually needed from attribution

Here's what mattered to him: where installs came from (organic, UA campaigns, word-of-mouth), whether cohorts were holding retention at day 7 and day 30, and whether any of those installs came from Rippl promoters he'd contacted. That's it. Not fraud detection across seven networks. Not custom attribution windows. Not real-time partner API feeds.

Adjust could do all of it. So could AppsFlyer. But they're built for studios with acquisition managers, daily budget reviews, and complex funnel analysis. They're built for scale. For people who need to make micro decisions about media spend in real time.

He made decisions once a week. He needed to know if his retention was holding. Whether to invest more in a specific campaign. Whether a Rippl partner was sending real engaged users.

The Attribr dashboard gave him exactly that. Cohort charts. Retention tracking at 7 / 14 / 30 days. A direct pipeline to Rippl so when a promoter drove an install, he could see it. No noise. No features he'd never use.

The 50KB SDK overhead mattered too. His games were already optimised. He didn't want dead weight. Sub-50ms launch time felt like nothing on a real device. Zero third-party dependencies meant fewer surface areas for bugs or platform issues.

The part that usually stops the switch

If you've ever moved attribution providers, you know the problem: historical data. With Adjust, he had three months of solid cohort history. Install trends. Retention curves he could reference. Every indie developer wants to keep that.

What surprised him was that historical data only matters if you're making decisions against it in real time. He wasn't. He was checking trends week to week. Once he had Attribr running for two weeks, the pattern was clear enough. New retention baseline established. New attribution source mapping locked in.

The moment of commitment came on that Friday. He killed the Adjust integration. Ran Attribr in production across both apps. Nothing broke. Retention still tracked correctly. Install sources mapped back to the right campaigns.

By Monday, he had sixty pounds back in his month. Not enough to retire on. But enough to know he'd made the right call. He said: 'I was paying for enterprise features I'd never see. This is what I actually use.'

Why the Rippl bridge matters more than you'd think

Most attribution tools are silent on performance marketing partnerships. They log the install, tag it, and leave the rest to you. You reach out to a promoter. They send traffic. You guess whether it landed.

Attribr has a direct bridge to Rippl. When a Rippl promoter drives an install, you see it. Not as 'unknown source'. Not buried in a CSV export. Right there in the dashboard. That changes how indie developers think about community marketing.

For this developer, it meant validating something he'd been wondering about: one of his Rippl contacts was actually sending engaged players. Not high volume. Twenty or thirty installs a month. But every one of them stuck around past day 7. They played, they spent time in the games, they came back.

That's gold for an indie studio. He could have paid Adjust to figure it out. Instead, he knew it in the first week of Attribr. And because the CPI was performant, he could deepen that relationship without fear.

The thing that made him laugh

On day five, he called me. He said: 'I just realised I've spent more time reading Adjust documentation than I have setting up Attribr.'

He wasn't joking. The Adjust setup is solid, but it's built for a world where you have SDK questions, team members to onboard, custom event tracking to wire in. The documentation reflects that. Fifty pages of possibilities.

Attribr shipped him what he needed. Install source. Retention cohorts. Rippl integration. A dashboard that didn't make him scroll through 'teams' and 'roles' and 'custom integrations' to see his data.

The learning curve wasn't a curve. It was a footnote.