A lot of founders plan to "skip Google's cut" by sending Android users to Razorpay for in-app subscriptions, right up until they read the fine print. The Google Play user choice billing India programme does let you offer your own payment system, but Google still charges a service fee on those transactions, only 4% lower, and you take on the work of running billing, reporting every transaction back to Google, and meeting its security rules. For some apps that trade is worth it. For many, it isn't.
This post explains how the programme works in India, what it asks of you, and how to decide. It's based on Google's Play Console Help pages at the time of writing, and those pages change. It's not legal or financial advice; read the current policy and talk to your accountant before you commit.
First: does Play billing even apply to you?
Google Play's billing requirements apply to digital goods and services sold inside the app: subscriptions, premium features, in-game items, digital content. They don't apply to physical goods or real-world services. A food delivery app, a cab app, a jewellery storefront or a fee payment for an offline class can take payment through Razorpay, Cashfree or any other gateway with no Play fee at all.
So the first question for any Indian app is which bucket each thing you sell falls into. Mixed apps are common: an ed-tech app might sell physical books (outside Play billing) and a video course subscription (inside it). Get this mapped before anything else, because it's often the answer to the whole question.
How Google Play user choice billing India rules work
After regulatory developments in India, Google lets all developers with mobile and tablet users in India, both games and non-games, offer an alternative billing system alongside Google Play's billing. The key points from Google's help pages:
- Choice, not replacement. Google Play's billing must stay available. The user picks which system to pay with on a choice screen.
- A reduced fee, not zero. When the user pays through your system, Google's service fee is reduced by 4%. Google's illustration of this has been that a 15% fee becomes 11%. You also pay your own gateway's charges on top.
- Scope. It covers in-app purchases and subscriptions sold to mobile and tablet users in India, and web payments offered as an alternative method in an embedded web view.
- Reporting. You report each alternative-billing transaction to Google within 24 hours of the payment being authorised, using the alternative billing APIs, so Google can invoice its fee. Google's India page also describes manual monthly self-reporting, due by the fifth business day of the month, for developers not yet on the APIs; check whether that option still applies to you.
- Security and user protection. You certify PCI DSS compliance for the payment processing and give users a way to report fraudulent transactions. You also follow Google's user experience guidelines for the choice screen.
- Subscriptions you've already sold through alternative billing without automated reporting must be migrated using the external transactions API.
What it costs you to run (beyond fees)
Because we don't quote numbers, here's the work instead, which is where the real cost sits:
- Two billing systems in one app. Play Billing for users who choose it, your gateway for those who don't, and a choice screen between them. Both paths need to grant the same entitlements.
- Your own subscription engine. Renewals, retries, cancellations, refunds and proration that Play would have handled. In India that usually means UPI Autopay or card mandates, with RBI's pre-debit notification rules and webhooks for when a customer cancels from their UPI app.
- Transaction reporting. A backend job that reports every alternative-billing transaction (and refunds) to Google on time. If it fails silently, you're out of compliance.
- GST invoicing and reconciliation for the payments you now collect directly.
- Support. "I paid but didn't get premium" becomes your ticket, not Google's.
None of this is exotic. It's also not a weekend job, and it has to keep working every month.
When it's worth it, and a date to watch
Our take: user choice billing in India makes sense when digital revenue is large enough that the fee saving clearly pays for building and running a second billing stack, or when you already run subscriptions on the web and want one subscription record across web and Android. Below that, stay on Play Billing, ship the product, and revisit once revenue justifies it. A smaller, well-run subscription business usually gets more from improving conversion than from shaving the fee.
One date to watch. In June 2026 Google announced a restructured fee model that separates the Play service fee from a billing fee charged when you use Google Play's payment system. It rolls out by region: the US, UK and EEA first, with the rest of the world, including India, scheduled for 30 September 2027. When it reaches India, the comparison between Play Billing and your own system changes, so redo the maths then. If you sell to users in the US, UK or EEA, the new structure may affect those transactions already, because it depends on where the buyer is.
Whatever you choose, keep entitlements on your server. A backend that knows who has paid, whether through Play, your gateway or your website, makes switching billing strategies a contained change instead of a rewrite.
orithLabs builds Flutter, native and React Native apps along with the subscription backends behind them, including Indian payment integrations. If you're weighing user choice billing for your app, we can map what you sell and what each option would take to build, as part of our mobile development work. The first call is free. And again: this is a summary of Google's policy as published, not legal or financial advice, so check the current Play Console Help pages before you decide.