• company

Harry Vaughan

October 23, 2023

The Customer

Since its launch 5 years ago, UniTaskr connects employers to a marketplace of freelance students who advertise their skills on UniTaskr in return for paid work or ‘tasks’.  When a buyer posts a ‘task’ in the form of a description, budget and date, students that have the required skill set for the task are then able to bid for the task and undertake the necessary work.

Tasks can vary from cleaning to part-time marketing and design tasks. It’s the ideal way not only for students to earn a bit of extra money on the side but also to hone their skills within their own specialism - great for the CV and future career opportunities in the long run! UniTaskr is based in London and can be used throughout the UK as well as the US. You can use UniTaskr on iOS, Android and of course, their website. 

How does UniTaskr monetise its platform? 

UniTaskr has a few models when it comes to monetisation. UniTaskr offers a few membership options for different users. Students can sign up as a ‘Pro member’ which entitles them to exclusive discounts, greater prize draw entries and reduced platform fees on tasks. They also run two membership tiers for business users looking to hire students on a task by task basis as well as recruiting full time employees from UniTaskr’s roster of graduates.

As a result of the ease of Glassfy’s implementation and initial set up, they now run all of these subscriptions through the Glassfy platform, except for users who sign up on the web based version of their product. 

The Challenge

UniTaskr is no stranger to payments and monetisation in different formats. The UniTaskr team has implemented a variety of payment gateways and open-banking solutions over the years. However, implementing in-app subscriptions was a new challenge that required strategic planning and careful thought.

They knew they would have to adhere to Apple and Google’s rules and regulations surrounding offering in-app purchases, but finding the best practices on how to implement subscriptions in a timely manner was critical.

As the team were on a tight deadline to kick start their iOS and Android apps with subscriptions for their premium plans, finding the right tool was critical for a quick release and reduce any technical complexities that may have arisen from handling subscriptions on StoreKit natively.

The Decision

The alternative for UniTaskr was to build their own implementation which would have required using an open source Capacitor package or the team building their own Capacitor plugin. They also would have had to handle purchase code logic on two different systems: iOS and Android. Whereas with Glassfy, the team has been able to harmonize subscription data between two different platforms into one place, resulting in the team being able to view subscription sales per subscription type and offering.

Glassfy was the obvious solution especially when the team received additional hands-on support from Glassfy to get their subscriptions up and running as soon as possible. Travis Bradfield, CTO at UniTaskr described Glassfy’s support as ‘tip-top’ when quizzed by the Glassfy team on how successful their implementation had been from the very beginning of their journey into subscription management.

The Solution

Glassfy was the perfect fit for their needs after finding a very neat tutorial online posted by Simon Grimm, specifically targeted at setting up in-app purchases and subscriptions using the Glassfy SDK on the Ionic mobile development framework. A framework that has proved popular amongst Glassfy customers and our developer community.

We had budgeted days to get IAPs working correctly and had it done by lunch time.

Travis Bradfield, also described Glassfy as being ‘well documented’ as well as explaining to us that ‘the APIs are easy to follow’ in his detailed feedback to the Glassfy team. Glassfy was one of the simpler implementations compared to other payment processors and systems the UniTaskr team has used in the past. Glassfy is on the easier to implement side of the spectrum when it comes to payment tooling for the team.

The best bit? The UniTaskr development team had their in-app subscriptions operational within a day! Beat that. Much, much, faster to get the new feature in front of customers than other payment facilities that the team has been exposed to.