It’s fast approaching a year since I last wrote about how much money my little app side hustle was bringing in, and how I had (at that point) reached a basic ‘break even’ point, which I defined as ‘my app bills for year paid’ i.e. bringing in enough to cover the price of my annual Apple developer subscription, covering my one off Google Play developer bill and covering the cost of setting up some domains I purchased as app landing pages.
As I think I’ve said before, I like the idea of being open and honest about my earnings and expenses - I put a significant amount of effort into building my wee apps, and whilst I don’t expect to ever make a true profit, some people have paid for the apps I make, so I think it’s only fair that I share a little about where that money goes.
Setting the scene Link to heading
First, let me set the scene for this post - to keep things simple I’m not going to talk about what I’ve earned since that last post, but rather what I’ve earned in total from my apps so far.
I’ll touch a little on the expenses I’ve incurred, and then talk about how I’ve thrown all the money away on one big purchase (which will make this post title make more sense…).
Gathering data Link to heading
So, how have I been gathering data? I could probably pull detailed reports from Apple, Google Play, Admob or Revenuecat, but instead I’m going to keep it easy - every month I note down my earnings in a spreadsheet, split into three streams (that are all a little different…)
- Ad revenue - I can see on my Admob dashboard what I earn each month - however, this only pays out every time the banked amount (which is locked in at the end of every month) passes £60. Over the holiday period (when ads are more lucrative) this meant a payout every two months, but outside of that it means a 3-4 month gap between payments.
- App Sale Revenue - I’ve implemented Revenuecat in all of my apps to mediate payments (which is awesome and free until a point where I start earning an amount probably high above what I ever will…) but the final processing still goes through Google and Apple, so most months I get a small deposit from each. Google pays around a month in arrears, and Apple are a bit behind that - generally I capture this amount when it hits my account unlike the ad value that I tend to forecast out on my spreadsheet, based on what’s been locked in each month.
Any money that comes in goes straight into a separate bank account (technically a partition of a bank account…) so I’ve got visibility of my total.
The numbers Link to heading
Ok, let’s skip to the end - as mentioned everything has gone into a single bank account, and although I have (and have tracked) costs, I’ve ignored them from that point of view… all of my outgoings I’ve paid for out of pocket, and left the app income accumulating.
So, what’s in the bank account? Right now, without taking anything out from day 1, I have exactly £764.16 and I know that over the next couple of months that total will (or would) rise to in the region of £900!
I’m not going to lie, I think that’s pretty cool!
I clearly couldn’t live off this and in the real world (if I don’t ignore my expenses) about a quarter of that has probably gone on costs… but it’s still ace that people have liked what I’m doing enough to support me (even if the numbers that support are generally low).
This is of course the total over the past almost two years though… although I have seen some growth as that time has passed. In the UK this income is after the 15% deductions that the app stores take from small developers and at this stage is essentially tax free for me… which would change to another 40+% deduction on any earnings above £1,000 in a tax year… although I’m not even close to that at this stage!
User numbers / Income split Link to heading
I’ll keep this fairly high level, but think it’s interesting to talk a little about how things split out as the apps behave a little differently in that sense.
Firstly, Air Fryr - this has by far the highest number of downloads (passing 7000 now!) with a regular churn of new users, but retention is lower and there’s a far smaller number of sales as a percentage of downloads - it’s the kind of app that people are happy to get for free, and even running a $1 sale only nudges people to purchase it. Interestingly though, it brings in more ad revenue (ad revenue is seasonal, but at the peak I was bringing in ~£30/month via ads, mostly from Air Fryr - although this has massively dipped now that we’ve passed the peak holiday season!)
Then we have WristTrack, which is in some ways the opposite - it’s got a far smaller user base, but it is both a) a much ‘stickier’ app (users that it clicks with will keep coming back) and b) a higher proportion of users actually buy it (and I’ve tried to start nudging that a bit by starting to add Pro only features… which I think is fair given the nature of the app and the significantly higher effort it requires to maintain it). Interestingly, a higher proportion of users who purchase the app, also purchase at a higher price - generally the prices of WristTrack are a choice of a small/medium/high payment (£2/£5/£9) - rather amazingly I’ve had a few purchases at the higher end and whilst I’ve not calculated an average, I suspect it lies somewhere slightly above the middle option, which is awesome!
Despite the differences between the two apps the income breakdown is probably close to 50:50 between them. (You may notice I’ve not mentioned MP Checklist, which is because my income from that is still single figures - but I’m always happy whenever anyone finds it and gets some use out of it, I didn’t build any of these apps to get rich!)
Outgoings (and the Shiny New Thing!) Link to heading
As I mentioned above, I’ve kinda ignored outgoings as I’ve just payed for things out of pocket when they come up, rather than using the actual income for them (although I’m definitely keeping notes, as there always is the potential that I’ll pass the boundary where I’d need to start reporting the income for tax purposes!), but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs involved with making the apps… A quick overview would include:
- Apple Developer subscription - £79/year
- Domain name registrations - £60 to cover the next 2 years (bumped up a bit due to the WristCheck / WristTrack rebranding)
- I also tried running some ads on Instagram, which totalled £60, but definitely did not return that value!
Going forward, I might try a few other things to help more people to find the apps, but that’s for another post! …and of course, I’ve not costed the hours I spend working on the apps (and that is a huge number really… definitely in the 100’s of hours!)
Since I have made almost made £900 though (including the payments I know are coming in the next couple of months) I decided now was the time to put a bit more of my own money towards this wee endeavour and upgrade my aging MacBook Pro to something with the oomph to get a bit more done!
I think I’ll write a separate post about this, as moving from an underpowered (in terms of RAM and hard drive space at least) Intel based 2019 MacBook Pro to a modern, Apple Silicon based one has been absolutely game changing - it will genuinely speed up my dev process no end… but it wasn’t cheap…
I do hope this doesn’t come across as boastful - I’m simply trying to account for the incomings and outgoings of a hobby developer (and this Mac will be used pretty much exclusively for this hobby!) - but the cost of this upgrade (with a student discount - my card doesn’t expire until this September!) was around £1900 (although I was able to claim and use some gift vouchers from cashback sites etc to help towards that…) So on top of the deductions above, I can add another £1000… this is not a cheap hobby! :’(
But I do still think it has potential to grow, and I love getting feedback and comments on the apps (both the main apps have a pretty favourable rating on the stores) and it genuinely makes my day to hear that people enjoy using them… and I’m not sure you can put a price on that…