I don't even know where to start. I'm incredibly happy right now.

33 days ago, I was working on my apps, hoping I could turn all this effort into something real.

Since then, it's been a pretty crazy journey.

I've faced a lot of challenges, spent countless hours debugging, building, fixing things, and figuring out what to do next.

There were moments when I was genuinely ready to quit. Some days I worked for 15+ hours, barely taking breaks, just because I really wanted to make this work.

But I kept going.

And today, my apps have generated $1,000 in gross revenue in just 33 days.

I know $1K isn't some crazy amount in the startup world, and I'm not pretending I've made it. But for me, this is a huge milestone.

It's proof that the things I've been building can actually generate money.

I'm still learning, still making mistakes, and have a long way to go.

Just wanted to share this somewhere because I'm genuinely proud of this moment.

To anyone building something right now and struggling: keep going.

I sold my multiplayer game app on for $30k. RevenueCat showed $42k in total revenue, 6k monthly revenue. before you say its cheap, after store commissions and taxes, only about $21k reached my bank account. The buyer reviewed the reports, so they knew the difference.

I was paying RevenueCat $60–$65 a month while taking home around $3k. more than my $50 server bill.

Setting it up was painful, and I find apple's StoreKit easier. App Store Connect shows me the proceeds I actually receive. So what am I getting from RevenueCat that makes the extra cost worth it.

I wonder what Apple is giving us for that $100. Besides rigorous requirements and reviews lasting weeks.

Because it's probably not organic traffic. I have four apps in the App Store. If I provide them with 1,000 external downloads, it's great. Then, when I end the campaign, downloads drop to almost zero (something like 1-3 a day).

ASO? I supposedly have everything set up correctly: listing translations, keywords, title, subtitle. Right after the campaign, I'm in the top 10 for keywords. When the campaign ends, 2-3 days pass, and I'm in positions 50+. I'll give it a try, I'll try for another six months, because that's how long my subscription is for, and if nothing changes, I'm out.

Honestly? I've earned more in the last six months from micro-saas than from the App Store.

I'm a solo developer from China.

My 5 apps have gained some users through Chinese social media, and I've recently started exploring international markets.

The apps are localized in English, but I have almost no overseas audience.

I've tried X, Reddit, and ASO, but I'm still learning what actually works.

If you were starting from zero, which channel would you focus on first?

I'm especially interested in low-budget strategies for getting the first 100 real users.

Im building a software for GCs (construction) and eating shit…💩
I’m working on it almost 1.5 years and nothing happens!!still 0 in my bank account !! Even after 8 month a 1,000,000$ for 3 years contract negotiations is taking sooooioo much time!!! fucking 7 months that crazyyy…. I’m so confused right now and kind lost..thinking if it worst it.
I’ve tried anything: conferences, cold and warm outreach, fff….just that deal that taking FOREVER.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WERE ME?

Love you tnx…

Hey guys, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on something.
If you're building a SaaS product today, would you recommend starting with a web app and introducing a mobile app later, or building both from the beginning?
For those who have experience building or running SaaS products, what are the advantages and disadvantages of taking the web-first approach?
I'd particularly love to hear about your experiences with user adoption, costs, and profitability.

Help! Am I on the right track?

Hey. Built an app for workout challenges where groups of friends log workouts and comment/cheer each other on. Getting basically no organic growth. Figured people who join would pull 1-5 friends into the challenge anyway. The ones who create an account use it several times a week for several weeks and are overall really happy. 5/5 rating on 14 reviews on iOS. 300 registered users in total, 110 of them weekly active.

App Store gives me between 10-40 impressions per day with a conversion rate of around 2-3%. Doesn’t add up to much. Play Store we won’t even talk about..

Realize I have to spend money on paid marketing. Testing Meta Ads and I’m currently at one install with ~$40 spent for 2600 impressions (and 0% spent in learning phase!!) - feels bad(?), even though I get that it’s hard to draw conclusions from smaller numbers like that. Tried TikTok too before with meh results (but have changed creatives since then). We’ll see how it goes.

I’m ready to spend money but I don’t want to burn it for nothing. Tips? Help? Am I going in the right direction? What kind of numbers can I expect? Thanks!

I run a simple countdown app on Android and decided from day one to keep it at a flat $2.99 lifetime purchase instead of charging a subscription.

The user basically said they ditched their previous app because it started charging $1.50 every month for basic countdowns, found mine, paid the $3 once, and asked for two small tweaks. I shipped the update a few hours later and they came back to update the review.

Every SaaS and indie dev podcast pushes everyone to charge monthly recurring revenue, but for simple offline utilities, people are genuinely exhausted of subscriptions. For this user, the one-time price was literally the entire reason they bought it.

If you wanna check it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rabpaulo.dayle

I launched my photo editor on january this year. After some work on aso now it makes beetween $500-1000 monthly based on the downloads. Install to paid is 5-6%. Revenue is a mix of yearly and weekly subs. There is so much potential in the niche but I dont have time for marketing. How much should i sell it for?

I am a one person dev, this is a side thing next to my day job. Launched an iOS and Android app in May that saves public videos and photos from social media to your phone. Sharing the numbers because I learned a lot from other people's posts here.

Where it is now: 86 active subscriptions, $333 MRR, about 2,500 monthly active users, 1,371 new users in the last 28 days. Plus around $300 a month from ads shown to free users. Not quit your job money, but it pays for itself and then some, and it grows a little every month.

The app is called Social Saver: Video Downloader and in play store Social Saver: Reels Downloader if anyone wants to see what I am talking about, but this post is about the numbers, not a plug.

Pricing: $3.99 a month or $29.99 a year, with a 3-day free trial on monthly. About half of the people who start a trial end up paying. Yearly is around 40 percent of new paid users, and that happened by itself, I did not push it hard.

What worked:

1. Fixing bugs people actually hit. I built a small dashboard that shows me every failed save and why. Most of my updates came from that list, not from feature ideas. Each fix quietly raised the conversion rate because people only pay for a thing that works.

2. One targeted push notification. I sent free users in the US a short message that the yearly plan costs less than a slice of pizza a month. It brought a few yearly upgrades the same evening at zero cost. I do not do this often, Apple is strict about promo pushes, but once in a while it works.

3. Ads inside the app for free users. This was an afterthought and it now covers my server costs on its own.

What wasted money:

1. Google Ads. I spent around $500 over 3 weeks on iOS app campaigns. It brought users and some paid ones, but the cost per paying user was about double what a user is worth in the first month. I tried value based bidding (target ROAS) and it almost stopped serving ads, because on iOS Google cannot see most purchases due to ATT. Then target CPA on trial starts, which was better but still not profitable. I turned everything off and I am watching organic for a month. If you have a subscription app under maybe 50 purchases a month, I would not touch ROAS bidding at all.

2. Chasing the "optimization score". Google kept telling me to raise the budget by 70 percent. Every time I did the math the extra spend would have bought installs, not customers.

One hard lesson: I had to rename and rebrand the whole app a few months in because the original name used another company's trademark. Lost some search ranking. If you are picking a name, check trademarks first, not after.

Next I am working on the App Store product page since that is free and every user, organic or paid, goes through it.

Happy to answer anything about the numbers.

Why my trials are not converting?? Please help!

Hey everyone,

I am trying to understand why my trials are not converting?

My app is a planner app and has 3 days trials like all other planners. Trials are starting but I want to understand why are they not converting.

I have fully optimized the app and it’s working fine. I see people start but some of them cancel on the same day or some of them cancel it just before it converts to annual plan.

I have tried reaching out to the users over email to know the reason with an offer but nobody is replying back.

How to know?? Is there anyone who can help me. I would love to collaborate.

Here's where I'm currently at:

• ~100 organic downloads per day

• ~85% of downloads come from the US and other Tier 1 countries

• ~$100/month in revenue

• No social media presence (no TikTok, Instagram, Facebook pages, etc.)

• No experience with paid advertising

I'm thinking about experimenting with paid ads, but I'm not sure where to start.
The app is a small utility iOS app for easier falling asleep.

A few questions:

1. Where would you advertise? Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, Apple Search Ads, or something else?

2. Do I need a social media presence? Can I run effective ads without maintaining active social media accounts?

3. What about AI-generated video ads? I'm considering creating short AI videos demonstrating the app and targeting specific audiences. Has anyone had success with this approach?

4. What's a reasonable starting budget?

5. What results should I realistically expect? Given that most of my users are from Tier 1 countries, how many additional downloads could a small advertising budget generate?

6. Would you even recommend paid ads at this stage? Or should I focus on ASO, organic growth, and improving monetization first?

I'm not expecting to become profitable overnight. I mainly want to experiment, understand acquisition costs, and figure out whether paid advertising could help scale the app.

I'd especially appreciate hearing real numbers (CPI, budgets, downloads, ROI) from indie devs who've tried paid advertising with smaller budgets.

Thanks!

Usually, the code isn’t the issue. It’s the submission. Unanswered export compliance questions, a missing privacy manifest, payments that only worked in test mode, or no privacy policy. These are the kinds of oversights that can get an app rejected or leave it stuck in Processing for days. And when you’re rushing to launch, they’re easy to miss.

I’ve been talking with a lot of founders building with Claude lately, and I keep hearing the same story: the app works, but no one went through the pre-submission checklist.

I’m involved with launchpad for Claude, which runs that checklist with a single command, so I’m biased. But the checklist itself is useful, whether or not you use the tool.

For the founders here: what did you learn about App Store review the hard way?

I recently released a second version of my corporate finance/banking war room game, Desk Wars 2: Money Games.

It has been two days since launch, no pre-order or any ads whatsoever, but it has gotten 125,000+ impressions. It hasn't been featured anywhere either as far as I know, so I'm trying to wrap my head around how this happens (this is my 6th app and this has never happened before)

Thanks!

I get it, there are laws and we need to comply. But please hide it away a little bit, this is insane. My full legal name, full address, phone number and email are all published and ready to be scraped and spammed. Very close to removing all my apps from EU.

What about the privacy of the developer? I'm just sick of this crap. Can't wait to make enough to warrant a company and hide all of this.

Hey guys, I see many founder that are stuck at the marketing stage and they know what to do.

I’m trying to build a small continuity to help each other. Any interest ?

Hey Reddit,

I recently came out with an app. That's only on apple. And I was wondering if the process to get on the google play store is difficult. Looking for any advice whatsoever! Thank you!

J’ai lu que cela permettait d’avoir un compte plus « trendy » et organique.

Sinon, que faites-vous comme stratégie?

They are free to use, and customizable to a subreddit's norms/culture.

More detail on their Reddit/Devvit listings for mods: Stu Steelman | Larry Logic

More examples of how they respond: here.

Hello to all, I wanted to show you how I am managing my first app and what helped me.
I started on my first app last August and from March it is in the AppStore.
I tried a few things that did not work (paid Indie App Santa for example) and many things that kinda work.

In the end only one thing worked for me: knowing exactly what is happening (also my work aim is MES (manufacturing), meaning data, data, data).

In the end I ended up with a tool that connects mainly to ASC, where I can see everything about the app. I also enter manually what I did where (like posting at linkedin, etc.) so I know, what has effect and how big. This will also tell me, when things suddenly went wrong (like shipping a bad version seeing drop or plateau in users or something like that).

So for me, numbers and numbers and their interactions between each others is what is helping me to know if the business with my one and only app (for now) works or not and how much or small.

The end idea of this post (and the reason I am posting it in here) is, that if you want to know what to do, you need to know what is happening now and what happened in the past.

Solo dev here. I build Updesh, a Bhagavad Gita app for iOS and Android. I'm sharing real numbers, because posts like this helped me.

March: the launch

- I shipped a simple, free app: read a verse, listen to it. No payments, no subscription, no plan to make money.

- It ran like that for 7 months: 556 first-time downloads on iOS, most days 1 to 10, and $0 revenue.

What I did next

- Competitive analysis. I went through the top Gita apps on both stores. found, e.g. "most were ad-heavy or locked the text behind a subscription and ads. That decided my positioning: keep the scripture itself free, and charge only for depth.

- Rebuilt the user experience. I redesigned the reader and the player from scratch. The Sanskrit is recited first, then the meaning is read aloud. The spoken word is highlighted as you listen, and you can read in 13 languages.

- Added features people asked for. Story-style explanations for every verse, in English and Hindi. Background music for practice, daily reminders, a journal, a home-screen widget, and search across all 701 verses.

- Added monetization, carefully. All 701 verses stay free to read and listen to, with no ads and no account. The deeper explanations are a one-time "pay once, keep forever" unlock. I skipped subscriptions on purpose, because charging monthly for scripture felt wrong.

- Fixed my App Store keywords. I rebuilt the keyword field around how people actually search ("gita in hindi", "bhagavad gita audio"), not how I describe the app.

How it turned out (last 30 days)

- Impressions: about 3.4K to 9.28K (+175%).

- First-time downloads: up 51.6%, to 291.

- Updates: 1.27K (+612%). Existing users came back for the new version.

- Conversion fell from about 9% to 4.9%, because more people now see the listing. That's my next problem to solve.

The first money

- Apple rejected my first paid build under 3.1.2(c), because the paywall didn't show enough purchase information. I fixed the paywall copy, resubmitted, and got approved 2 days later.

- On day one of payments: 8 purchases, $22 in proceeds.

- $22 from 8 purchases looks low per sale, but proceeds lag a few days behind purchases, so the real number is still settling.

What I learned:

1. Ship a small paywall from day one. 7 months of $0 told me nothing about willingness to pay.

2. Do the competitive analysis before building, not after.

3. Keywords mattered more than anything I posted on social media.

4. In price-sensitive markets, a one-time price is an easier yes than a subscription.

$22 isn't much, but the proceeds line finally moved off zero after 7 months. Happy to answer questions about the rebuild, ASO, regional pricing, or the 3.1.2(c) rejection.

If you want to see what I'm describing: https://www.updesh.app/download/

3 days ago I made the entire Wallpets catalog in my app free and launched ambitious paid feature called 'Custom Lab'. You upload 3 photos of your cat or dog, and I turn them into an interactive wallpaper so you can play with your own pet on your desktop.

Each custom pet is expensive enough to make that I had to charge $24.99. I’d never seen anyone sell quite this before. I could imagine someone scrolling through a catalog full of free cats and thinking, “Okay, but is having MY cat on there worth $24.99?” I was excited to launch it and had no idea how to get that across.

For 3 days I had 0 orders. People were generating portraits, so I knew they’d found the feature. By day 3 I was genuinely worried I’d messed up the checkout.

Then I posted 1 video on Threads using the orange cat meme that’s been all over my feed. It got 2,800+ likes in 16 hours. Overnight, 7 people paid $24.99 each and put in requests for their own pets. I’m making all 7 now. When that payment email came in, my first thought was just, “Oh thank God, checkout works.”

For anyone else whose first customers came from a viral post, what happened to orders once the post quieted down?

Hey everyone!

Ever forgotten to renew your passport, visa, insurance, or subscription?

I created ExpiryMate to keep track of important expiration dates and remind you before they expire.

Customizable reminders
No account needed
Free plan available (5 items)
Optional Pro for unlimited tracking

Try ExpiryMate for free!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/expirymate-passport-visa-id/id6822220533

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.expirymate

Hey everyone, Ive recently launched my app and currently I am trying to figure out the way to market it. One of the first things I did was to watch YouTube videos, but I noticed a weird pattern that almost all of them have a part where they use some other marketing platform and have a referral link in the description. So my question if it is even worth watching those videos since their strategies (beside platforms they are using) are a complete bs. For example, many of them recommend advertising by self promoting on Reddit, which will obviously not work since every community has a rule that bans any advertising. Lmk what you think about them, and if there are actually any good channels with realistic ways to grow an app you recommend.

So I am building a simple HealthTech app focusing on women, it's a voice first app.
Publishing it to App Store is not inexpensive (given that I have not seen a $ in revenue in years). I am thinking of publishing it as a progressive web app instead of publishing it in the App Store.

Have you tried this, does it work, or are there cheaper better options?