If you have big dreams of making a living creating iPhone apps, a new report will make for sobering reading. The average monthly revenue an app generates after one year on the App Store is less than $50 per month.
There’s some encouraging news though: it seems there’s a tipping point if you can get the app to the point where it’s making $1,000 a month…
RevenueCat, a company that aims to reduce the drudgery of offering in-app subscriptions, conducted an extensive analysis of more than 30,000 subscription apps across 18,000 developers. Among other things, these apps have registered an impressive 290 million subscribers and generated around $6.7 billion in revenue.
But like TechCrunch notes, the headline figures mask great variability.
The top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 […]
The company found that only 17.2% of apps will reach even $1,000 in monthly revenue.
However, there is good news. If you does manage to hit the $1,000 per month mark, then there’s a decent chance your income will continue to grow.
Once they reach that point, the prospects for their further growth increase. For example, 59% of apps that reach $1,000 will reach $2,500, and 60% of apps that reach $2,500 will reach $5,000.
Beyond that, things get much tougher again, with only 3.5% of apps making $10K in monthly revenue.
If you want to maximize your chances of financial success, health and fitness seems to be the category to target.
Health and fitness apps generate more revenue after one year, performing at least twice as well as all other categories combined.
Stay away from the travel and productivity categories: even the top 5% of them make less than $1,000 a month.
RevenueCat believes one of the trends in the coming year will be to offer more one-time in-app purchases, along with subscription options.
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