The big picture — three steps to grant yourself premium#

The whole thing is simple and breaks down into three steps.

1. Copy your app user ID inside your app (after wiring up the implementation for it)
2. Search for that ID in the RevenueCat mobile app and open your own Customer profile
3. Use Grant on the Entitlements card to assign the entitlement you want, with a short Duration

Entitlements assigned via Grant (Granted Entitlements) live entirely on RevenueCat’s side, independent of the App Store and Google Play billing systems. Nothing gets charged, and nothing converts into a store subscription^1. It’s exactly the right tool for giving yourself access.

Below, I’ll walk through each step along with the parts that actually bit me in practice.

Prerequisite for step 1 — make the ID tap-to-copy#

For apps without their own login system, RevenueCat automatically assigns each user an anonymous ID: the prefix $RCAnonymousID: followed by a random string. This is the only handle you have for locating your own Customer profile^2.

The problem is its length. It is not something you can transcribe by eye, and taking a screenshot to retype on another device is not realistic either. Displaying the ID inside the app and making it copyable with a single tap turns out to be the implementation that pays off the most later.

In tanzaku, this row lives in the app info section of the settings screen. In React Native (Expo) it looks like this:

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import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';
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import { Pressable, Text } from 'react-native';
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import * as Clipboard from 'expo-clipboard';
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import Purchases from 'react-native-purchases';
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export function AppUserIdRow() {
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  const [appUserID, setAppUserID] = useState<string | null>(null);
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  const [copied, setCopied] = useState(false);
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  useEffect(() => {
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    Purchases.getCustomerInfo()
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      .then((info) => setAppUserID(info.originalAppUserId ?? null))
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      .catch(() => setAppUserID(null));
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  }, []);
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  const handleCopy = async () => {
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    if (!appUserID) return;
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    await Clipboard.setStringAsync(appUserID);
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    setCopied(true);
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    setTimeout(() => setCopied(false), 1500);
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  };
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  return (
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    <Pressable onPress={handleCopy} disabled={!appUserID} hitSlop={8}>
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      <Text>{appUserID ?? '—'}</Text>
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      {appUserID ? (
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        <Text>{copied ? 'Copied!' : 'Tap to copy'}</Text>
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      ) : null}
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    </Pressable>
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  );
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}

Three points worth noting:

• Get the ID from originalAppUserId on CustomerInfo. It’s available any time after the SDK is initialized
• Copying is just setStringAsync from expo-clipboard. On bare React Native, @react-native-clipboard/clipboard does the same job
• Add feedback that the copy happened (showing “Copied!” for about 1.5 seconds is enough) so there’s no doubt whether the tap registered

There is no need to hide this as a developer-only feature. When a user reports a bug or a purchase problem, you can tell them: “tap the user ID on the settings screen to copy it, and send it to me as is.” It doubles as a support channel, so I recommend putting it somewhere plainly visible.

Step 2 — find yourself in the RevenueCat mobile app#

RevenueCat has an official mobile app for both iOS and Android^3. It doesn’t carry the full dashboard, but it can search customers, view Customer profiles, and — the star of this article — grant entitlements.

The point is to install it on the same device you develop with. Tap-copy the ID in your own app, switch apps, and paste it into the RevenueCat app’s search box. You reach your own Customer profile without ever leaving the device.

You can do the same from the dashboard on a PC, but then you need an extra hop — mailing yourself the ID or syncing it through notes. It’s not an operation you do constantly, yet whether that extra hop exists changes the psychological barrier to toggling entitlements more than you’d expect.

Step 3 — Grant it, and keep the Duration short#

Once your Customer profile is open, choose Grant on the Entitlements card. Pick the entitlement you want (for tanzaku it’s premium), set a Duration, and it takes effect immediately^1. On the app side, the entitlement shows up in customerInfo.entitlements.active, so your normal billing-check code reacts to it as is.

Now for the main topic: the Duration. The options range from A day up to Lifetime, and intuition says “I’m the developer, Lifetime is fine.” Having actually run this, short durations like A day are the right call during development.

The reason is simple: you regularly need to test the state where premium is NOT active. Which screens do free users see, do the ads render correctly, does the paywall flow feel natural? When you want to check these, a long-duration grant is in your way. You can revoke a grant midway, but considering the friction of opening the dashboard to do so, the routine of letting it expire in a day and re-granting when needed turned out to be far easier. The expired periods naturally become your free-user-perspective testing time.

On the other hand, once feature work settles down and your main mode becomes daily-driving the premium state, extend the Duration. Re-granting every day is genuinely tedious at that point, so switch to something intermediate — a week or a month. And once operation is stable and you find you almost never need the free-state tests anymore, that’s the natural moment to switch to Lifetime. Think of it as stretching the Duration in stages as your phase progresses.

Incidentally, granted entitlements show up in the dashboard as products prefixed with rc_promo, so there’s no risk of confusing them with real purchases^1 — they won’t pollute your revenue metrics either.

Closing thoughts#

That’s the whole procedure for granting yourself premium access in RevenueCat, organized from real experience.

• Build the tap-to-copy app user ID into your app from the start. It serves both developer grants and support workflows
• Install the RevenueCat mobile app on your development device so that copy → search → grant completes on one device
• Keep the Duration short (A day) during development. Stay in a state where free-tier testing is always one expiry away, and stretch it in stages as your phase advances

All of this is obvious in hindsight, but whether you wire in the ID-copy implementation at design time completely changes how casually you can toggle entitlements later. If you’re about to add subscriptions, I recommend including the few lines equivalent to AppUserIdRow in the same PR as your billing code.

References#

1. RevenueCat Docs, Granted Entitlements https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/customer-history/promotionals
2. RevenueCat Docs, Customer Profile https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/customer-profile
3. RevenueCat Blog, Introducing the Official RevenueCat iOS App https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/company/new-revenuecat-ios-ap/
4. RevenueCat Docs, Entitlements https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/getting-started/entitlements