Costs of running a macOS app studio business
notes.alinpanaitiu.com
notes.alinpanaitiu.com
I still get to play with software, but on my own time, and on my own schedule.
The difference is amazing.
Personally, I don't take legal action even if I think I can win the case, because it's just too much time and effort, and I don't want my life to focus on said legal procedure for the next n months.
I assume other people also think they need to choose their battles.
Also, I found out that some younger folks really hate us. A number of folks used the interview process to try humiliating me, and taking out their personal animus.
After a few of these, I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and just accepted that I shouldn't bother looking, anymore.
But I think people are being hoist by their own petard. I'm seeing folks in their forties, that never had any issue, finding work, hitting the wall. These were people that did it to others, when they were working.
We can't become other races, and we [usually] can't become other genders, but we all become old, so each of us will have a turn at the wheel.
Keeps me busy and up-to-date, and is extremely gratifying.
I'm getting ready to release an app that is a top-to-bottom system, involving a couple of servers that I wrote, along with a fairly robust native iOS frontend.
Works a charm. I've enjoyed it. Of course, I have to keep my scope humble, but I've always been able to punch above my weight, so it's working out.
If I was able to declare it, I'd never pay a dime in taxes.
I have heard that Steve Kamen, who wrote the "I Love New York" jingle, gave full rights to the state, and never has to pay state taxes. I haven't found anything that corroborates this, but it could very well be true.
The work I do, is for a demographic that tends to be ignored. I doubt there's any tax breaks, headed my way.
I've found that most non-tech folks don't have any idea how much it costs to have real talent working for them (or even crap talent). I don't feel like arguing about it. I can't declare it, so it's not worth the agita.
And half of the companies simply ghosting unwanted candidates with no response after the interview.
Protecting yourself against discrimination doesn’t mean trusting the courts. It means being willing to lie or mislead people into thinking you aren’t in the category of people who gets discriminated against, making yourself too much trouble to fire, and finding open-minded employers.
If you’re in a disadvantaged group, you need to pick your battles, and accept that life isn’t fair.
Businesses have pushed heavily for at-will employment; this means that businesses don't need to say why people are fired.
So they don't have to write down why you were not hired, nor why you were fired.
So you have to prove that you were not hired/or fired for being in a protected class. This is extremely difficult short of a recording of the interviewer saying e.g. "so you're pregnant?" => can possibly argue discrimination, but it's still difficult. This kind of stuff works in a panel interviews or bad work environment when you can compel testimony from other workers who would rather risk their job over jail... but doesn't work well in 1:1 or 2:1 situations where one or two people just need to lie to avoid the lawsuit.
Maybe isolating cubicle walls, snail mails, audio-only telephones, and non-engineer sales representatives were good things. And possibly VR avatars in the future too.
But anyway, the point is, threatening someone who hates you(for any reasons, not limited to their bigotry) to work with you is not the path of least resistance.
When the CEO is 26, then it's easy to have a young workforce. In The Days of Yore, the C-suite was generally folks in their fifties, and the youngsters were forced to work with their chronological seniors. The older folks had the money and power, but they needed the creativity and energy of the younger workers.
If the workforce is all older folks, you get shipping product that no one wants. If the workforce is all younger folks, you get ... FTX.
Look at some of these "full team" photos, for many of these new companies. You won't see a grey hair anywhere, and, if you do, a bit of research usually shows them to be a Principal.
I fully admit that it's a world that doesn't want or need people like me. It really pissed me off, at first, but, in the aggregate, it has resulted in the first truly happy work that I've done in decades, so it's all good.
That said, some of my former employees are near my age, and were able to find work, but it took each of them, several years, and they didn't have the baggage of being a former manager.
Hearing experiences like these make me glad I never got a job at a startup or smaller “tech” company.
In my (limited) experience (about five years ago), the recruiters were always engaging, helpful and friendly. However, as soon as one technical person (usually young) got involved, the temperature dropped about thirty degrees.
I may not be God's gift to programming, but I'm not that bad. I do, for example, have over thirty years' experience shipping extremely high-Quality products, in very challenging environments. In many fields, that usually commands a tiny bit of respect.
They do need you, but they don't know it, yet.
They were a hiring manager. Candidate looked good on paper. Invited for on-site interview. At the on-site, the candidate didn't want to answer questions. They just stated that their race and gender were discriminated against in this field and if they weren't offered the job, then they would sue. My friend consulted with their boss and the lawyers and they decided to offer the person the job. They were qualified and they turned out to be good at the job.
I'm still in the typical 9-5 job since I'm way too young to retire (and we don't get paid the crazy money in the UK that software engineers in parts of the US do), but I've been able to settle on what I want and what I don't want so I have the power to walk away.
In the simplest terms, I just need to be at a place working on something I give a fuck about, which pushes me to smaller upstarts. This sometimes incurs a bit of a paycut but I see that as a worthwhile hit to take if I don't feel like I'm selling my soul to people I realise I don't want to work for.
Just gotta avoid the lifestyle creep so a temporary downsize doesn't contribute to mental distress.
The system is designed to capture everyone as a wage slave and every year there are more barriers put to keep the "pleb" in their lane.
The only way to build wealth (independence, freedom) for one's family is through starting a business that you can scale.
If you go to work at a company always think how you can use the knowledge gained there to start something of your own. Use salaried work as a paid for education, not a mean for living, otherwise you'll get trapped forever.
30 is a turning point, where most people realise about the situation they are in and look for escape.
> In the simplest terms, I just need to be at a place working on something I give a fuck about
That would always be one's own business.
If you are not in a position to run one, always ask for true equity in the business you want to work in.
Yes, if all those miracles come true that lottery winner can retire early, but I don’t think that is a broadly applicable plan.
And Seattle is probably a much better place with respect to taxes and cost of living. Most other cities where FAANG will employ are fine. Don't have to be #1 to win.
Still a lottery winner with respect to the global employment market. But if you graduated with a US software engineering degree, you can make this happen.
After working in a 4k person org, I don’t think I could stomach working at another giant company.
EDIT: There are some people here who claim you can earn that kind of money outside the US, but they never give details when pressed, or describe some kind of very specific set of life circumstances you will never be able to replicate.
I invest 3.8k CHF / month from base only. All in all, I save ~100k CHF a year counting bonus and stocks.
Pro tip: avoid highly specialised knowledge that can only be used in particular firms e.g. highly capitalised or regulated entities. Yes you will be paid well above market rates but it will be very difficult to convert those skills into a business because you won't have access to the market as a solo entrepreneur.
Time and again I'll see that the people who start successful lifestyle businesses started off in a lower paying, more general career e.g. web development. It works because you'll encounter problems that apply to a huge market, and you'll have past customers you can tap into to sell your product that addresses those problems e.g. WordPress plugins or invoicing software particular to your region of the world. Boring but high demand software.
For example, you spend 15 years becoming a lead engineer for a vehicle manufacturer. But there's very few ways you can then that into a solo business, other than consulting (which is no longer the same work).
Here in the U.S., many such items would be considered capital assets, for which the cost would be recognized as an expense over time through depreciation, for both management accounting and tax purposes. It appears Romanian practice is similar; see “Depreciation” on this page:
Can you elaborate on your last point? For salary you still need to pay >20% income tax + social insurance, and for dividends you still need to pay >20% after you just paid your corporation tax >15%.
I'm curious, why its better to pay yourself more, when your laptop, phone and even food can be covered by the company? (Assuming a single founder company, doing everything legally)
If you directly pay yourself 100.000 as wage it is fully deductable as company expense. So you don't pay any company taxes and would only need to pay income taxes of ~25.000.
So a payout as wage you have 75.000 instead of 52.500.
For both values at least in Germany you would also need to pay health insurance and possible for pension. (Health insurance at least additional 8.000 - 10.000).
A good tip I once got was that you should always try to get money out of your company while you can - having it on your personal bank account is better then in your companies one.
Depending on how your local tax codes are structured and how strictly your local tax authority interprets them, letting the company buy the electronics and then subsequently using it for non-business use might count as a fringe benefit and therefore be taxable. In other words, if get your company to buy you a iPhone 15 Pro Max and a 16 MBP Pro with M3 Max, but all you're doing is some light macOS app development, they might (rightly) think that those aren't really being used for business purposes and are actually a sneaky way to remunerate yourself.
Not really black hat though: it's extremely common. In many countries there are specific rules as to how much you can deduce: say 33.33% yearly and after three years it's considered to have a residual value of zero or 20% yearly and after five years it's considered 0.
But then: if you play by the rule, by not deducing 100% in a year... After x years it is considered to be worth just that: zero.
So even though "it's still worth something", from an accounting point of view it can be worth zero (depending on the item).
So you can do whatever you want with it even if it's true value is not zero. You can burn it, stash it, give it away for free.
Basically: anything you do with it except specifically sell it is easier from an accounting point of view.
Things get a bit more complicated when you cannot deduce 100% over x years but only, say, 60% over x years. Then the company, logically, is supposed to sell the item (laptop, bicycle, car) for 40% of the residual value to the item.
For example a friend of mine had his company buy him a 10 K EUR bicycle (no kidding) and after x years (don't remember if it was 3 or 4), he bought the bicycle for himself for 2 K EUR.
Fantastic work. Absolutely critical for taming the weirdness of my LG 5K display.
> But I could not fit into the same old Slack chat + Zoom meetings + SCRUM + daily report + doing something that you feel it has no purpose in the real world for 8 hours a day madness that consulting work needs. So I said "no, I'm sorry, I'd like to continue building my apps".
I work for a "big tech" company and do consulting work on the side, and it's the former that has all of the Slack/Zoom/Agile/meaningless nonsense -- with consulting I feel as though I'm actually solving a problem for a business in a meaningful way.
I guess all consulting gigs aren't created equal - I guess I've managed to avoid the bad ones so far.
thats confused and wrong. it doesn't matter one bit if the merchant-of-record collects and remits VAT or if you do it yourself. the money ain't yours either way.
what does matter in a big way for small business is VAT liability in the first place. merchants-of-records like Paddle and the various AppStores are basically liable for VAT in every country around the world.
however a small business (like in this example with 100k revenue) is not VAT liable everywhere because VAT thresholds are often much higher. if you sell directly (e.g. via Stripe), you don't have to collect the VAT when selling in most jurisdictions except Europe. so you can either offer the product for 20 percent less and have a more competitive price or increase the price by the VAT and pocket it yourself instead of having to give it to the government of the customer.
if believe this makes a huge difference for small companies but is rarely mentioned.
EU, I suppose. What happens when you collect VAT from EU customers? Do you have to transfer to each of EU countries? Is it enforced somehow? What if you don't collect VAT at all? Technically speaking, EU customers buy stuff on your site, not in EU. E.g. they also buy stuff from US Amazon.com and don't pay any VAT. Especially for digital goods - there is no need for an EU delivery address.
Otherwise, registering in your country is a normal thing.
This is a good link from the article: https://vat-one-stop-shop.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-07/...
EU VAT law is very well documented, compared to say German income tax law. It's actually fun to understand if one can use such a word here.
If, let’s say another service does not do that, you have to pay it your self, but MOSS[1] exist for that, which means that you’ll pay for your local tax agency, and it will distribute VAT payments per country.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...
I totally appreciate the frustration the author has in various fees needing to be paid.
But zooming out, having a business with 64% net income on sales is insanely good.
We should never take for granted the margins in tech. Where almost all other industries have margins around 10%.
...when you don't factor in labor costs. If this was google or similar, the company would need to hire a developers, which are a major line item on their budget.
[1] https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states...
Same thing for most consumer goods - they have a (very low) base price and the rest is pure profit margin which is adjusted according to the local purchasing power. Consumer goods in Romania would be much cheaper than in a Western European country; whether by existing manufacturers lowering their profit margins to match local purchasing power, or other manufacturers managing to fill this gap in the market by selling at more affordable prices.
Most goods like food and furniture are made by large Western European companies( mostly german and austrian) who utilize economy of scale to make those and can ship and deliver them in large quantities to shops that they THEMSELVES control.
It's impossible for a country like Romania to develop its own champions in a traditional industry like this.
Rent and prices for decent quality are similar. I know because I made investments there. Folks here are quoting some rather below par prices, that local usually stay away from _if they seek decent housing_. There are rundown areas, such as that where Tate lives - next to a cemetery - but a few streets further away and prices double. You dont see the upper extremes as in vest europe but for “regular” folks the col is similar.
Also there’s a lot of “under the table” money involved in buying property, so actual prices are way, way, higher than official figures. Typically if you wish to make some _very_ high margins you invest in bucharest or cluj. British expats living there extatic, not just because they could afford to buy (working locally albeit for western companies), but also because they made decent profits if they bought 5-6 years ago.
> A one-room apartment in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Brasov, Sibiu or other big cities will cost from €350 to €500 per month
Good luck finding that in Manchester!
Also found an entire building on Bucharest's second busiest street Magheru Blvd for €1.4M. Out of my price range unfortunately but it does include 12 separate 3 bedroom apartments, a floor of offices, and a restaurant, cafe and art gallery at street level.
This sounds extremely dubious and I would not take that into account in any relevant real estate price for central Bucharest :)
It's about twice the house you'd get for Manchester money. Maybe there's other factors to consider, but the idea that Romanian housing is the same price as the UK's doesn't make much sense to me, and I can't find evidence of it being true.
I followed a kind of reverse path in a way: I ran my own small business for some years (first with a partner, then solo) but I eventually got burned out due to the feeling of being always-on. I’m now in contractor mode but working mostly like an employee for every project I participate in, and this did work better for me financially and personally too.
That said, I always think of maybe trying my business again (though I wouldn’t have employees next time around) and now that my daughter is about to start University doing animation and video games, who knows, maybe she needs a programmer one day and I can be that guy. That’d also help her work for herself and not be an employee. Thank you for an inspiring post!
Also, I somehow didn’t know about rcmd. I feel frustrated by cmd tab since ido-switch-buffer in emacs has spoiled me; it seems rcmd is close to that for task switching so I’ll give that a try right after my current vacation, so I’ll be a user of another software by you :)
Edit: s/helped/herself/
You pay high taxes but you get a semi decent education and health care services. That much money pays for millions of people coming from Romania to your country to work there and provide you with services.
Those people are irreplaceable for Romania.
I am learning Swift/swiftUI (as a backend guy with little previous experience with frontend/UI programs, okay) and building apps for OSX can be very painful. Starting from outdated docs (basically no books about OSX development since ... 10-15 years? or more?) to the new fancy ways of doing things with SwiftUI (that sells the promise that "you do it once,..." and it will work exactly as they planned to when you sell *Hello World* apps).
It's not the use case itself to be hard, but the fact you need to support multiple operating systems (which as you might know, Apple produces every year a brand new model, so imagine the fun), or that maybe the specific API you rely on (from Apple, not some random guy out there) has some weird memory leak because it's written in C++ or Obj-C, who knows last time someone touched it. And Apple is updating everything but that specific thing, so you need to build something around it. I don't even want to start on the lack of libraries for Swift - a lot of open source libs are outdated, bugged, last commits 1-2 years ago, which means you either have to fork and fix, or well, you do it yourself from scratch.
Nowadays selling software for OSX has basically nothing to do anymore with the idea or use case itself but all the toil that the poor developer has to put with up. I learnt that most apps on the App Store deserves some money (sometimes they ask for a lot, nothing to say, but that's their business model).
Reverse engineering skills have greatly improved the way I develop things on macOS nowadays. Having access to any process memory and variables and being able to alter it using Frida makes it less painful to navigate obscure macOS APIs.
Although if it’s a problem in internal SwiftUI code, I’m afraid nothing can help you.
> Reverse engineering skills have greatly improved the way I develop things on macOS nowadays.
I don't even want to know what you have to deal with for your app that handles the brightness of the screen. Monsters are probably less scary :)
In my case, the expenses are so small (<$1k) that they would not significantly affect the final tax to be paid, so I just left it at the end as an aside.
As someone who, in a past life, also sold apps on the Mac App Store (with some success), I could never escape the sense of insecurity, whether it be Apple "breaking" (or fixing?) things every WWDC, constant pursuit of the next idea, or potential competition. Not to mention, the fact that sometimes reviews seemed oddly personal and the occasional rude customer support emails could ruin a day. (This all probably says more about my own mental psyche than anything and I'm glad some people thrive in it.)
In the end, I felt more comfortable doing the 9-5 engineering job, but it was definitely worth it and really taught me to be self-sufficient and exploratory in software development.
Thankfully, my best selling apps are published on my website, where I don’t have reviews. I have a contact form which can lead to the same disappointing messages, but at least they’re not public and don’t stay there forever.
But yes I understand you, I had many periods when I contemplated going back to a “normal” job.
We're out of communism for more than 30 years but the mentality of officials has barely changed. People are dying in dirty hospitals of infections that they didn't have before getting there (see Colectiv 2015). Analphabetism is higher than in previous years. You will choke and get lung pain if you want to take a walk on the street in most villages because of the coal being burned by poor people.
Education and healthcare are in dire need of money, and we're always on a tight budget and raising taxes.
> At least 13 of the victims that died in hospitals were killed by bacteria, probably because the disinfectant used was diluted by the manufacturer to save money.
(From Wikipedia.) That's so sad to read, considering they had actually survived the fire.
What makes you think so?
CEE politicians are crooks that believe cattle (the voters) are to be exploited and they cant compete with the developed world anyway.
3m out of 20m of romanians have left the country and there's no way investments in education and health care would make a dent in this.
When it comes to internet it's kinda the result of deregulation compared to Germany and it's relatively simple business that brings monthly recurring revenue.
It's not all that bad in Romania and all great in Germany but then again you can't really compare them. As I said a lot of wealth in Germany is built on the foundations in the old industries where German companies (and the people) hold the added value. It's impossible for Romanian companies to capture this value in construction, banking, pharmacy, insurance, consumer goods.
As long as the semi-passive income from the apps leaves a bit to be saved every month, and there are better things to spend life on, then it seems to be a good choice.
However, modern money system functions well enough that earning a lot a money in a period of time will afford not having to do that later. The question on what to spend time on is definitely harder a priori than a posteri.
— Kalique Abrasa, Jupiter Ascending
Sounds like a "lifestyle" business. One which provides income to meet (and exceed) your needs, but you're not stuck head down to the grindstone as life passes by. :)
So your hourly wage with the apps is, likely, much more than $120/hr.
And it was my choice to build more apps and continue spending that earned free time writing code instead of using it all for outside stuff. Mostly because I still need more money to buy my own place.
But you’re right, in the end everything will add up and I’ll hopefully have my own place and I’ll be left with enough free time and some of those apps will still sell well enough to make a living. Compound growth is real here, I’ll be getting a lot more worth than $120/hr.
I found Apple to outright manipulative. Pay 100$ a year and we reserve the right to delist or reject your apps for no reason.
I work as a consultant, but for the same reasons: I choose to work only a few days a week, take the salary loss, and spend more time with my young kids. A time will come where I'll start working more, which will also unlock more meaningful work – but for now that's a choice I'm happy to make.
I also asked for a 3-day work week from my last company when I wanted to try and make Lunar paid. It's incredible how much your life changes when you're not defined by your job anymore.
Because you spend more time (4 days) doing some other thing than your job (3 days), you really start seeing what's actually important, and the question "what's your job" no longer has a straightforward answer.
I appreciate the writeup and the thoughts on time and money, yet the complaints about taxation for someone making this much money in that country, cannot but ruin it a bit for me.
Don’t focus on the money, I could be making a million a year and it would still not fix the problem of life insecurity and overall sentiment of hopelessness.
I also do not necessarily like the implications you responded with, as I was discussing something you posted publicly about yourself and a detailed description you gave. I have made my choices and continue to make the choices I can. I understand I also benefit from huge amounts of priviledge and I try to use it to change what I can, not complain about it. I understand its frustrating and most importantly, the things you described show how dignity is being taken away from you, but imagine, for a second, how those millions making less than you feel. How they can't make any choice and if you do not lead by example from your position,if you, who sits so highly on Maslow's hierarchy, feel such injustice, what do those millions below you feel?
Anyway, thank you for sharing the details, it was an interesting read.
In June 2021 I launched Lunar v4 with the new support for Apple Silicon and I also added a paid tier. I started making good money from the start, most likely because Lunar was already "known". I was making about $3k/month back then, which was enough for me to not need a full time job anymore.
Getting to $6k was a gradual process since 2021 until now: constantly launching free apps, giving more attention to those that provided utility to most people, adding paid tiers when I had enough to offer over the existing free features.
Last year I worked on a pet project iOS app (which I never released unfortunately) and one of my struggles was figuring out how I'd portion out the features from free to not-free after release. I was thinking at the time of doing what you've done, basically releasing as free for a while and then adding a paid set of features. It's just difficult to plan what should fit there.
After the launch, feedback will guide you through what noted features to act on, and even add some more.
Launching it as free also gives you time to iron out the inevitable edge cases that won’t appear in your tests. People will have lower expectations, and feedback will contain less angry tone, which is usually a big demotivator.
The “launch early” phrase you keep reading in maker circles, makes a lot of sense for indie devs. It’s easiest to validate an idea, and get help on the direction of the app. Your idea of what the app should be is not always the best idea, user feedback can help fine tune that.
However if you have a very specific vision, and “if someone pays, good, if no one pays, still good”, then disregard what I said above. Keep working on your vision, something unique might sprout out of that.
EDIT: I realized I might not have answered your actual question. Because I always build apps to fix a problem of my own, I make free only what’s essential for that problem. Like what I would do in a script, but with just a bit of polish and UI for it to be usable by non tech users as well.
That’s how Clop launched: first it was a single Swift file that checked the clipboard for images in a loop and ran pngquant on them. I would run that at the command line. Then I packaged it as an app with minimal UI and released it as free.
Most of everything else will be paid. That’s what happened with video and PDF optimization on Clop.
But if it’s an improvement on an existing free feature, I will add it for free. That’s what I did with ignoring specific types of images from the clipboard, or detecting Universal Clipboard etc.
Alin, are you ok to share the specs of that server? I'm interested mainly because I'm a server guy and have a bunch of stuff at Hetzner, but nothing (yet) big enough to be US$600 for a single server. :)
The cheapest are €44.76/month so that's already ~$600 (if you want your server to be located in germany you are already at minimum €51.36/month which would be ~$680)
But you can get better bang for buck on the "serverbörse"/server auction. (That's what I'm currently renting)
But if you want to have large storage while also using RAID + a decent amount of RAM you'll still get to the ~$600 per year pretty easily.
I don't know what you have at hetzner, maybe you are thinking about VPS?
EDIT: ah okay, you thought it was $600/month?
Yeah, complete brain-o on my part.
We have several dedicated servers with Hetzner, but nothing like a $600/month one. :)
But currently there is one server at the auction for €600, so there are definitely some people using Hetzner who spend that kind of money for one server haha
There is no way to share a direct link to it, but these are the specs:
CPU:
AMD EPYC 7401P
RAM:
16x RAM 32768 MB DDR4 ECC reg.
(so 512GB total)
DISKS:
2x SSD U.2 NVMe 960 GB Datacenter
4x SSD SATA 3,84 TB Datacenter
It needed a bit of sleuthing which I liked, it’s the other non-code stuff that I disliked.
Oh I realized now that you probably meant how I found, as in searched for the job, not how I liked it. Well I had a small button in the middle of the front page of “The low-tech guys” that lead to this page: https://lowtechguys.com/business
The copy is different now as I wanted to take another stab at helping my friend get into consulting. He just had his second child recently so we stopped that idea.
Is there a good site or source or something to find more apps like this? I am a fan of these very simple purpose built Mac apps that are keyboard heavy and solve simple problems.
I find it horrifying that Apple takes such a big part of the revenue (and at the same time still forces developers to May for a membership program). It's double the taxes the benefit everyone and not just Apple shareholders. That's insane.
Some might say that spending more time on marketing is what gets more money, and that’s a bit true. But only after you have a good base and you’re confident in your app being stable and providing utility. Otherwise, the advertising peaks will not result in sustained revenue, they’ll be just that, peaks.
Bingo! In fact, i've been doing custom dev for my entire career and i developed an instinct that instantly tells me a good client from a bad one. If something clearly has no purpose in the real world, is an absurd bullshit, then i know it's a good project and worth taking. That's just how business works, a natural law of competition: if something makes any sense and provides any value to people, there will be a lot of talented, energetic people doing it so competition will be insane => no money to be made.
After all, it's all just a game, in the end of which money either falls on your account or it doesn't. It's not supposed to make any sense in the first place, otherwise it's no longer a job, it's a hobby.
That’s painful to read.
I remember Marco Arment saying he didn’t do support at all via email. The argument was that it would take all his waking hours or he would have to hire a whole team just for that. I thought it was arrogant and, honestly, unacceptable back then, but maybe he was right after all.
Congratulations on the apps, they seem incredibly polished. And kudos for the clarity of direction in life. I’d choose to make 3X what I do and deal with the Zoom and soul crunching day to day.
That's why I write apps for a corporation now.
(Personal experience/anecdata follows.)
I don't know. I sell a macOS/iOS productivity app on the App Store[1], and while not getting rich there, I can tell you that's actually useful to people, you can put a non-peanuts price tag on it. I love that it's relatively straightforward to get an app out in front of a lot of potential customer.
That said, I wouldn't never rely on the App Store to surface my app on its own, it's ridiculous.
More users than ever.
There are a lot of things that suck on the App Store, but it's definitely possible to make a living.
My “not bad” remark is because I still can’t afford housing with all the money I make. I’ve been living in rent since college >10 years ago and I’m sick of it. You get no legal benefits when renting in Romania, everything is done by hiding from the state and local authorities. So you can’t even get a family doctor in your area.
Me and my wife have been trying to buy a house for the last 4 years and even tried to renovate a 100 year old house in an isolated village because it was all we could afford. Long story but we got scammed, the land plot is unusable in its current state.
Housing prices are so out of control here that even with that consulting money I would still need to not spend anything for a year to be able to afford a house that doesn’t need heavy repairs and has all the paperwork in good order. It’s very common here to sell houses that were built without a permit.
Having a lot of money relative to the place you live in doesn’t guarantee your happiness. Privilege means nothing in the face of illness of a loved one, having to live with parents at 30 because you had to evacuate a rent made without contract and more things I would like to not share on a tech forum..
Please get a sense of what’s being talked around here, what’s the negativity for?
The point is that the net income you get is very high for european standars, let alone Romania. With that level of income it is really weird that you cannot solve the problems you have.
The phrase "I would still need to not spend anything for a year to be able to afford a house" is bonkers.
Believe me, I’m so sick of “calling for details” because everyone hides most useful details in the house ad, then asking if it has paperwork ready which most don’t and expect you to buy the house based on how the house looked 20 years ago before heavy renovations with the cheapest materials possible, then spending numbing hours on trains to get to see that house in real life only to see how many lies were said on the phone and how that house would never be evaluated at more than half its price…
That above is extremely common, I’ve been going through this for the past 4 years and I’m So. Sick. Of. It.
OP, consider moving to a country where renting doesn't turn you into a second class citizen if this really bothers you so much. It's counterintuitive, but you'll probably find the property markets to also be more sane there.
I'm actually a structural engineer with a passion for passive houses and went into programming 8 years ago. I designed and built a lot of houses and I know what you're talking about.. the house builders chase profits disregarding any laws.
IMHO the best thing is to buy a lot and build yourself the house, this way you are sure that you get what you want.
Your post reeks of jealousy for OP's net salary but you fail to account for your accumulated wealth over time of you and your family. OP's had not been earning this wage for years while you and your family has.
OP probably uses a lot of his net salary to support his spouse and family while you dont have to do that.
Why don't you consider buying the house with a bank loan? it's the best decision to do so even if you have all the money... if you talk with a financial consultant you'll see why.
Housing prices are not out of control, we are lagging years behind other European countries in regard with house prices. If you look on the numbers you will see that this is actually a good time to buy a house in Romania.
But I could not fit into the same old Slack chat + Zoom meetings + SCRUM + daily report