What Shipaton Judges Want to See About Your Pricing

RevenueCat tells Shipaton judges to look for "a well-crafted paywall, thoughtful pricing and packaging, strong conversion, and monetization that genuinely fits the product."

Every guide to that criterion reads pricing as what to charge and how to package it. One number, one set of tiers.

Target market covers two things though: who your users are, and where they are. The second half has an answer whether you write one or not, because the store already generated it from your base price.

The target-market question has been in the criteria for two years

One of the judging questions attached to the HAMM Award, quoted in full from the 2026 rules:

"Is the monetization strategy realistic and achievable within the context of the target market and the app's functionality?"

That sentence is not new. It appears word for word in the 2025 rules too, which is the useful part. It is a standing question, and the default answer is whatever the store generated from your base price, because that is what happens if you never open the pricing screen a second time.

If a real share of your users sit outside North America and Western Europe, a single base price ignores what each of those markets can actually pay, and the target-market half of that question goes unaddressed.

A screener watches two minutes

RevenueCat published how judging works in June: a staged funnel, a minimum of two RevenueCat screeners scoring every app, and roughly 100 apps reaching final scoring.

Prescreeners are required to do two things: "watch the first 2 minutes of the submission video" and read the project submission and the answers. Judges must "read the entire description", watch at least two minutes, "review all of the screenshots", and score one to five in each category.

Your pricing gets exactly that much attention: whatever survives two minutes of video, one read of the description and a pass over the screenshots. A price grid is one of the few pricing decisions you can show rather than explain, and a screenshot of the same app priced for four countries lands inside a window that a paragraph of reasoning has to compete for.

The submission form now asks for the numbers

There is a real change for 2026, and it is in what you have to hand over rather than in the criteria.

The 2025 rules asked you to "include a description of the app's monetization model with an explanation of why that model was chosen". The 2026 rules ask you to "include a description of your monetization strategy and results: how the app makes money, your paywall/pricing approach, and any conversion or revenue numbers".

"Explain why you chose your model" became "show your pricing approach and your numbers". RevenueCat's submission guide from August says the same thing plainly: "Explain the business model, pricing, paywall, conversion, and revenue, including what you changed or learned."

So the field wants prices and rates now, where it used to want a rationale.

What 100 paying customers are worth depends on where they are

RevenueCat's guide to growing your app during Shipaton, written for the 2025 event and still linked from the 2026 Shipaton site, puts a target on it: 100 paying customers, which they call "ambitious but realistic".

What those 100 payers are worth depends on where they live. From RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026, cut by payer geography (the report defines geography as "the region users are based in"):

RevenueCat's own read of that chart is that the geographic gaps narrow once payers reach year one, with Western Europe's median sitting 38 percent above IN/SEA's. The conversion gap is the wide one: you need more than twice the trial starts in IN/SEA to land the same number of subscribers.

These are medians across apps, and the spread between apps is far wider than the spread between regions, so resist multiplying any of them by 100 to forecast a total.

Emerging markets are not worth less. The same 100 payers just behave differently depending on where they are, and a submission that says "1,750 subscribers at a price that works where our users are" is describing something that happened, while one promising $10,000 a month from Indian users by December is making a claim the medians do not support.

Setting a price for the markets your users are in

RevenueCat's price localization guide puts numbers on the gap, from Jacob Rushfinn's look at ten apps country by country, offered there as rules of thumb rather than platform data: Apple recommends pricing India around 21 percent below the US, while the apps in that sample price 50 to 80 percent lower.

That is what localized pricing does. You set each market's price against local purchasing power rather than the exchange rate, then round it to a number that reads naturally in the local currency. I have written up whether parity pricing actually grows sales and the mechanics of doing it elsewhere.

For a submission this comes down to something you can finish in an afternoon. Be able to say what your app costs in your three biggest markets and what rule set those numbers. "We charge $9.99 everywhere" asks a judge to take your pricing on faith. A grid with a stated rule behind it answers the target-market question before anyone asks.

The packaging half is the same kind of work. Decide between a hard paywall and freemium on purpose, and if you are still choosing between recurring, one-off and a lifetime purchase, the tradeoffs between the three models are worth twenty minutes before you commit.

What the 2025 HAMM winner did

First place in HAMM went to Vector Guard, a tick and mosquito identification app. Every $2.99 premium subscription automatically funds 50 free accounts in high-risk ZIP codes. RevenueCat's write-up calls it the 1:50 Justice Model. One sentence, and you understand what the price does.

The Grand Prize went to Payout, which finds class-action settlements you qualify for: 17,000+ users, $30,017 in revenue and 1,750 paying subscribers, built with Claude Code and Cursor.

Payout's is a revenue figure, and it won the Grand Prize out of roughly a thousand apps. Vector Guard's is a design decision that cost nothing to make and explains itself in a line.

Rules worth checking before you submit

Previously released apps are ineligible. The first public release has to happen inside the submission period, so an update to an app you shipped in June does not qualify.

The deadline is September 30 at 11:45pm PDT. Judging runs October 1 to 13, and winners are announced October 21. Store review time is yours to absorb, and RevenueCat has published a late submitter's guide to app review for exactly this stretch of the calendar.

If your app monetizes through RevenueCat Ads or web purchases, both of which qualify, most of the pricing advice above does not apply the same way, because your revenue story does not live in a store price grid. Best Game entrants get a different bar again: that award judges "a monetization fit that suits the genre".

If you want the grid done for you

RevenueCat runs the purchase itself: the SDK you are required to use, the paywall, the entitlement. What the store fills in for you is generated from your base price rather than chosen for the market, which is where the target-market question goes unanswered.

PricePush is in the Shipaton Sale. The free plan covers one app, every country, both stores, and ten price pushes, which is enough to set local prices for a hackathon entry without paying anything. Code SHIPATON26 takes 60% off the first year if you need more than one app, renewing at the regular price after that, and a few founding lifetime seats are open. If you only want the numbers, the free localizer gives you the full country grid for any base price with no login.

If you want the broader version of the pricing question, how to price an app covers it from the start.