Just 17.2% of apps ever pass $1k/mo. Of those ~35% hit $5k/mo. 3.5% hit $10k/mo | Hacker News Reader

Just 17.2% of apps ever pass $1k/mo. Of those ~35% hit $5k/mo. 3.5% hit $10k/mo

techcrunch.com

20 pointsSurfTokyo12 comments

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I'm shocked how good those numbers look. 3.5% of the apps hit 10k/mo? That's incredible.

But it is subscription apps. If we take all apps?

3.5% of the initial 17% no?

No. This section of the full report[1] shows it is 3.5% of all subscription apps. See the chart for a clearer visual.

[1] https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2024/#...

To an A-student overachiever in the top 5% of their class they must look positively tantalizing. Even assuming half of that 3.5% have insurmountable brand habit or other scale moats not available to you.

Assuming you have many ideas/solutions, how would you choose an under served market category to target?

If there is no low hanging fruit left users must be very happy. Or too set in their ways or addicted. The app stores are not going to advertize their true user content metrics like countries do but rest assured app stores have that data and would move to a much more exploitative mode if they believed no new great apps are to come.

Don’t be, Im guessing it’s those that use RevenueCat which probably means the subset are those with issues in which the standard toolbox is not good enough..

RC apps are significantly more likely to succeed. The overall “success rate” is (much) lower

Data is on 29 000 apps that use it. And their second tier is 1700 month one...

So my take is that it is actually very limited set of apps that are in this data.

Does not sound that bad. I've published like 10 very bad free apps when I was learning android development.

This makes sense considering that there are so many apps. It’s similar to how the vast majority of books aren’t read and the vast majority of papers are not cited.

Apps are a long tail market so it’s not surprising that so few make money. The cost to make an app can be the $99 fee to Apple.

Honestly I expected lower numbers. The title seems a bit negative, but let me rephrase this as: if you make 6 diverse enough apps, one of them could give you non-trivial monthly pocket money (or income if you live in a low CoL country). Once you know what you're doing, trying different 18 apps may land you a decent global income. (This assumes single creator apps)

It's not amazing, but... that doesn't sound too bad, right? You shouldn't drop everything and start an app development studio without a good buffer, lots of spare time, or a separate day job, but that's higher chances than people jumped on with many startups.

It shows that if some people find the subscription worthwhile for a time then it will likely continue to do so for more people. The fact it generally tops out at $10,000 per month per app might just indicate a race to the bottom with copycats.

It feels great to say "You can't just slap a subscription on to your app or put up a paywall over every feature and expect to make bank" but of course this report is not the full story of every app business model.

And app devs are not all that dumb, if they have something with potential they will nurse it towards the best outcome. I'm sure a non insignifcant amount of subs are donation subscriptions set at a low yearly amount to set a better pace for ongoing feature development - devs that only want to work as hard as the potential extra cash permits them.

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