Top Grossing Finance Mobile App Generates Barely $80,000 Annually
techvibes.com
techvibes.com
I can believe that its impossible to 'grow a business' on the back of one $3 or $4 app. Except why would you only have one of those? And if its that hard to write and maintain (so it takes an engineer full time to keep it going) then selling it for $3 or $4 is just bad business. Apps that need an engineer full time post ship are $20 apps.
However, I do feel the article is interesting from a user's perspective. If my $3 purchase only nets the author a $80,000 income from a popular work, there is little incentive for him to continue to work on the software. That means I'm unlikely to see it improve or grow in ways that will continue to benefit me in the future.
We've come to know continual product updates from not just software, but with physical products too. Seeing that process disappear could come with an interesting long-term impact.
I also have a constant "income" from one of my apps, even though that income is one $0.99 purchase every one or two weeks.
It is doubtful that any software could provide "perpetual income" for no further work.
Despite the fact the bits themselves remain the same, software requires maintenance as much as roadways; the underlying OS changes, user expectations change, security flaws are discovered and urgently require attention, etc.
The update/replacement process is very unlikely to disappear unless the world suddenly begins changing much more slowly. What may happen is that users jump from app to app if the apps are priced too cheaply to account for maintenance.
Edit: Also, the infrastructure one might need for "maintenance mode" is significant. One of the other ironies of software is that there a considerably smaller ratio of effort-to-result for "small updates and bug-fixes" compared to new feature implementation.
I've seen variants of this comment around. I wonder if some folks have some illusion that an 'app' is like a lottery ticket that makes them rich forever. Rather than spending 10 - 15 years making Apps and taking any excess money and saving/investing it for retirement or some future kind of thing. I reminded a young high school student who was enthralled in the dream of "release and the money comes rolling in" [1] that the reason its called 'work' is because you have to keep doing it to keep the money flowing.
[1] A big shout out for Corona as a nice easy to get into App development environment.
That's why $80,000 isn't enough. The risks are too great to continue for the demonstrated return.
I'll say it again: the smart way to make money in the app store is to get paid writing apps for other people.
Paid apps are (generally) a sucker's bet if you want to build a sizable business. The vast majority of the top grossing apps in the store are making money on in-app purchases. It turns out consumers are fairly reticent to buy apps based on a few descriptive paragraphs and some screenshots... But they're happy to spend money in apps that they like.
"Canada's Top Grossing Finance Mobile App Generates Barely $80,000 Annually"
Isn't it likely that there are financial apps built in other regions that gross more?
Looks like they only do well in English-speaking markets, so they'll mostly live and die by their US performance. So it's more accurate to call them the #75 finance app (that's about where they seem to hover). $80k/yr to be number 75 in your biggest market doesn't seem quite as bad.
An interesting question is: why are they #1 in Canada? In the US, there are dozens of better selling budget trackers. What's different about Canada?
http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/gros/?device=iphone
I think it's very difficult to make decent money charging upfront for a mobile app that is to appeal to a broad market.
It barely makes $350 a month.With that revenue there is very less incentive to spend time and do updates.But nonetheless I still give it some time.I guess other devs likewise are motivated by other things than money.
While mint.com isn't entirely a finance app, it was sold for $170 million. I'd assume that price would not have been paid if it were only grossing $80k/year.
Also Bloomberg has a free app that's pretty awesome. It's hard to peg how much revenue that app is responsible for bringing in, but regardless, I'm sure it adds more than $80k/year of value to the company or they'd can it.
2) How big of a market do they think personal expense accounting apps is?
I wish purveyors of this data would simply provide annual gross revenue per app for each percentile ("top-grossing 1%", next 1%, next 1%, etc.), and let ME decide whether that revenue would or wouldn't "break even" or be "sufficient to support a standalone business".
Has anyone seen such data?
I can thereby understand asking for both sides, so you can do the subtraction yourself, but if I was going to see either the result of someone performing the subtraction or just one of the numbers being subtracted, I'd have to say only the former provides value; this is certainly true of you want to break them up into brackets: the top 1% by revenue might be losing money while the middle third are raking it in.
You're clearly correct that annual revenues per app without the costs it took to achieve those revenues is not all you would like to know. It's only one piece of relatively well-defined data, which you would have to supplement with your own estimates, based on looking at lists of popular apps and estimating what it would take to create them, of what it would take you to produce something similar.
But having just the results of how often an undefined value exceeds another undefined value is not more information than one well-defined value; it is less.
Now, of course, if they were to provide much clearer definitions of their terms ("breaking even", etc.), and give us some assurance that the developers who answered the questionnaires were quite clear on those definitions (not as certain as simply, "how many dollars per year does the store send to you for that app?), then we would both probably be happier with the data.
Don't add up to me.
That said, unless this is a massively complex app (which I doubt), it really should take much less than a developer man-year. Plus, I'm guessing that this $80,000 is the net revenue, after they've paid their developers.
Still, it's not exactly inspiring for those of us starting to do mobile app development.
Whilst I'm sure there's plenty of devs toiling away making next to nothing I'm going to guess there's another set who are making reasonably solid amounts of money as a supplemental income to their main jobs, or enough money to justify doing it. You only ever hear about the wild million dollar success stories, or the stories of woe. The inbetween? Not so much.
If I remember correctly, we were making ~$250 a day and were in the top few thousand apps in the store. The VAST majority of developers make almost no money at all.
This is bull crap. Angry birds have made multi million dollars. Finance in itself is a dull category. They should start something like "paint your mouth" kind of app :-)
With down votes people are trying to say that they are saving the world but they don't try to get the message that other person is trying to give
Plenty of very good apps make no money. The world will be a better place when people understand basic statistics.