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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

I'll bet $100 this story is complete bullshit. It's in techcrunch's interest to publish "get rich quick" stories when in actuality the real story is "starve." I should know.

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I'm not sure how common it is for apps to be making that much, but I know one of the top apps is pulling in $5,000+ a day, and it's by an individual developer.

I was making around $150 a day from an app with 100,000 monthly active (90% were CPA ads with the rest being socialmedia), and there are a fair amount with over 5 million monthly.

do you mind sharing the names of these apps?

I agree. I totally understand ojbyrne's scepticism, but after a number of conversations in the last couple months I don't have any trouble believing TechCrunch's claim. The question is whether the money is sustainable.

Does it matter if the money is sustainable? I only ask because there is a good chance that the cost to develop the app is much less than 500k. I would take a month of that kind of revenue and parlay it into capital for another venture if it stopped suddenly.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. That's the attitude I see in developers. The apps that make money are often not very complex, so it's worth the effort even if the party doesn't last forever.

and further if TechCrunch can back up it's claims with specifics

Which CPA ad provider were you using ?

azoogle

nice call sahaj to ask for specifics. Unfortunately I doubt you will get them.

There's a lot of secrecy in the industry right now, because most developers see it as a fixed-sum game. Most apps are not technically difficult to duplicate, so saying publicly that your app is making lots of money is asking for others to copy it.

You're wrong. But in the absence of evidence, denial prevails. And most of these indie devs are not going to provide numbers because they don't want to attract attention/competition.

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