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Comment by BigHatLogan | Hacker News Reader

Very cool that you made these apps. I’ve wanted to make some educational apps for quite some time, but have been too lazy / indecisive about the whole thing.

If you don’t mind sharing, how are the apps doing? Are you seeing consistent downloads? How about pricing? I noticed both are free—are you planning to monetize at all?

You don’t have to answer anything you’re not comfortable with. This is just a space I’m interested in, and I wanted to see how your experience has been.

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Not the person that created this thread, but I've had a bunch of music education apps in the App store for a couple of years. I get a decent amount of downloads, enough to make $60-$120 a month. I sell them outright for $3.99 (Canadian). I actually found I increased sales when I increased the price, I used to sell them for $2.99. I haven't checked recently, but there weren't many high quality music games there, mostly basic looking drills that weren't themed. I'm sure I could increase my sales if I was savvy at marketing and had the resources to commit to it.

Thanks for the response. That’s pretty cool to hear. So it sounds like you get anywhere from 15-30 downloads per month. That’s not bad for money earned while you sleep.

I’m thinking of getting into the space to see how I can do. My eventual goal is to earn $1000 / month without too much maintenance / time beyond the initial development.

It's really great for that to be honest: I don't have to worry about the games once I upload them (unless I decide to update them or make changes). I also run a site with music games for teachers that's subscription based and that takes up more mental bandwidth from day to day than the apps since I'm always trying to improve it to help keep customers subscribed. If you head into the App store with modest expectations, I think it can become a decent source of income. I talk to relatives and friends and they seem to think that having an app in the store means you'll get millions of downloads a month, but I think that skewed perception is created by the focus on the really big apps in the store (that seem to get a lot of help directly from Apple in how prominently they're placed in the store).

There are over 2 million apps in the store so it’s hard to get noticed.

Yeah that’s what I was thinking—that the store is so over saturated right now that it would be hard to make your app visible.

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