Breaking Even…

Right, while I’m in the blogging mood, here’s another post that really is long overdue! Back in March (wow!) I wrote a quick update on how much income I’d made via advertising on WristCheck and via ads on the website and promised further updates.

Since then a few major things have happened - firstly, I released two additional apps (technically I released MP Checklist just before that post…) and secondly I finally got around to adding an in-app payment option to allow users to pay what they wanted to turn the ads off forever (and again, I definitely need to write a little about how and why I implemented that!).

So, it’s now six months later and I have additional income streams… am I rich yet?

The Goals

Let’s go through things again and break things down - I’ll take data from a spreadsheet I keep and call out my earnings across ads and in app payments, then add it all up at the end!

Firstly though, why am I monetising the apps? I won’t do the full breakdown again, but as I mentioned in the first post on this subject developing mobile apps isn’t free. Again I’ll ignore the cost of my time (it is a hobby after all!) but in summary I’m looking to make a little over £100 a year to consider myself broken even - since the last post I’ve registered some new domains so let’s set a target of £150 for the purposes of this post.

Ad Revenue

So, how much am I earning from ads? Well firstly, nobody reads this website, so from the web ads, virtually nothing! In total I’ve earned £2.79 from the website, and based on this I think I’ll roll back the ads - I think they just get in the way. I also have zero intention of adding any to the app landing pages as those aren’t there to be monetised, but to help people find the apps.

Speaking of the apps, those are actually a rather different story! My total ad revenue between October 2022 and August 2023 is actually a quite healthy £91.18… yes, you read that right, I actually earned enough from ads to cover my annual Apple Developer fee of £79!

This includes a couple of spikes in both May and then again in August where the Air Fryr app went a bit viral - amazingly people (when they learn about the app) seem keen to try it so a few mentions on Facebook Air Fryer groups (yep, that’s where I hang out now!) has been enough to give me some big bumps in revenue. After the first time the user numbers did slowly roll back down, but I’m just coming off one of those peaks and currently have around 1100 users across the apps! Which is honestly amazing!

In App payments

Now lets move on to in app payments - I introduced these earlier in the year but they are paid by the platforms a month or two in arrears. Income isn’t massive (I did get an initial jump on WristCheck from existing users who must have welcomed the ability to go ad free) but I do see the odd purchase one or two times a month.

In total though I’m tracking an total across the apps of £55.11 - not massive, but I honestly think it’s so awesome that people value what I’ve built enough to consider paying for it at all!

Totals

So, doing some creating rounding that adds up to rough expenditure of £150 and rough income of £150…

As the title of this post proclaims, I’ve pretty much broken even!

What next?

This is partly why I’ve turned a bit of attention to trying to increase awareness of the apps to drive installs a bit - I’m putting all revenue into a separate bank account and would love to now aim to save enough to get a second hand iPhone to aid in testing whilst I’m building the apps (I’ve kept my old Google Pixel 4 to use specifically as a test device and it makes a bit difference on the Android side of things) - nothing fancy, just something old and second hand that’ll get at least one or two more OS updates.

Will I manage that? Who knows, but one step at a time eh? Maybe one day I’ll earn enough to retire!

Credits: Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash