You’ll never guess how little a Top 10 Mac app makes per day

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Mac App Store
The Mac App Store isn't a goldmine like iOS. Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

How much profit do you think you’d make per day if you coded a Top 10 paid app in the Mac App Store? $10,000? Maybe even $20,000 a day?

While the iOS App Store has been a gold mine for developers, the paychecks aren’t nearly as fat on OS X. Sam Soffes is an app developer whose Mac app Redacted reached No. 8 top paid in the United States and No. 1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It also sat at the top of Product Hunt with 538 votes.

All those eyeballs surely meant big bucks, but when friends on Twitter tried to guess how much Soffes had raked in — the average guess was $12,460.67 — the real number was much, much lower.

In a sobering blog post detailing the launch of the app he’d been been working on that quickly hides parts of an image, Soffes revealed he made $302 that day off a total of 94 downloads.

“7 of those units were promo codes I sent out. Only 59 of those units were in the US. It’s pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.”

Redacted is priced at $4.99. (It was originally going to be $2.99, before a bunch of Soffes’ Twitter followers suggested $4.99 would be a better price point.)

The app is currently ranked No. 14 in the top paid charts. Soffes says he almost decided to stay an indie developer and try to make living off his iOS app Whiskey.

“I’m glad I didn’t,” he writes. “I work at Venmo as of May 4th.”

Source: Soffes

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