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
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
25 responses to “You’ll never guess how little a Top 10 Mac app makes per day”
$300 a day is nothing to cry about. If someone gave me that on a regular basis I’d be happy.
Uh, There’s nothing suggesting that he makes $300-something a day. Unless I’m missing something it sounds like he made $302 that one day, I imagine it fluctuates from day to day.
Yes, I imagine that too, InconvenientWalrus. Well spotted. Do you like trains?
You original post indicated you didn’t imagine that. Missed any trains lately?
I’ve missed them all, herbaled. I have nothing better to do.
so he’s making $110,000/year with little to no expenses? That sounds like a nice deal.
-heathcare
-401K
-vacation pay
-sick pay
-unemployment insurance
-social security payed by employer…
so, you work for yourself but you’re still crying about vacation pay and sick pay? right..
It depends on where he lives, $110,000 is not the same in San Francisco as it is in rural Alabama. Plus, That was how much he made on launch day. It’s not an average.
If you’re a qualified app developer, not a one hit wonder, you have multiple streams of income and an ever growing corral of applications. That or you siphon off this money as a revenue to help launch something more stabilizing. Regardless making six figures is making six figures. If you live in a place that’s too expensive there is an expansive world out there you can make that stretch for years with. ;)
After self-employment tax you’re looking at 80k for an individual off maybe 3-6 months worth of effort and a derivative that probably has a degrading long tail. In a flip tale my family of 3 earns <30k a year after 6 years of bringing a brick and mortar into the real world. Yea.. I'm not crying for top app developers. ;) What I'm building might have long term value, but in the flip of things his life he can enjoy a vacation. I enjoy about 4 days off a year. lol. Sounds good to me too.
Wish you guys knew of the minimum wages here in México. This guy is pretty much a very wealthy man compared to most of the paid jobs in here.
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I wouldn’t purchase that app either. I can do that with preview! Why pay $4.99 for that? That is the problem I guess.
Exactly. I’m not sure how much he was expecting to make on such a simple app with an extremely limited target market.
It’s pretty embarrassing for Apple that he got so high on the charts for such few sales. It’s only going to get worse as Apple drive more developer out of the MAS with silly restrictions that benefit no one but the review team
Do you know that things masked in Preview can be unmasked in Adobe Reader and also preview? I found out accidentally.
I was thinking about images, not PDFs; hence the comment.
Am I reading into this the iOS users are willing to spend money but Mac users are not? Seems there are a lot of Mac users out there – see any picture of a college lecture hall or even any computer conference. Does a typical Mac user just use what is freely available to them? Word processing, light spreadsheet, presentation, email and web browsing?
I wonder what a company like Adobe sees in terms of sales on the Mac vs. the PC.
That’s not how I see it. I see Redacted as an app with a specific use that the majority of potential buyers don’t require. Why buy an app for a simple task that can be done by apps built in to the OS or by any other graphic/design app that can do much more?
$302 a day?? What’s there to complain about? I’m sure that’s more than Lady GaGa makes off Spotify a day…
Why would you expect thousands of dollars a day? lol
it appears people are suffering from too many numbers floating around, they hear free apps downloads of 20,000 or 50,000 per day, they hear “top selling app” there are ranks in each category, and ranks for paid and free and gross per category, then there is the rank per country, no one wants to hear how many subdivisions of rank, they just want a number….. what people are failing to understand is that “rank” changes every 3 hours at least too. This person is simply being influenced by all these numbers floating around, and expecting to earn such and such. here is the reality, a paid app in a similar category on iOS would also make some where in that range. there is a huge difference between paid apps, and free apps… a huge difference between US sales and UK or DE sales. and a huge difference in rank each hour in each country. in the next few days he will probably see his sales drop to about 20 apps per day, and eventually he will look back at that as the good ole’ days, if his idea is easy enough to copy, unless he creates and maintains and updates and makes something valuable. So guess what, writing apps is like any other work, it takes dedication, a good idea, and 99% sweat and execution even AFTER it is on the app store. and thats after spending months and years developing of 12hr days, There was only a few developers that “got rich quick” even for iOS, just like the california gold rush. the ones that make it afterward must spend their time wisely, like any other work.
Who is spending months (eg. > 6 months) and years developing ios apps? Apps are disposable and even paid apps are rarely supported beyond 8mos to a year. I wish they were. If they don’t die a v2 is released and you have to rebuy, or you get into the subscription model like any SaaS.
I’m not trying to devalue your statement overall. Development is a job. I did it for 15 years so I know the row. I wish there was a bit less opacity into the numbers behind paid apps but you don’t create hype with a top paid app for the day being 5. lol.
Any developer that gets into the ios game either has to find a value that is lasting and not just some extension that Apple hasn’t bridged yet but something more unique. Then you need to have a few more eggs in your basket so you can have more resiliency in your income stream. You are a development group of 1, or maybe a few…which has considerable downsides if you don’t have some real revenue models.
I worry most developers who get into app development are young and full of idealistic hope that build-it-and-they-will-come hits. When the reality is any development, software, ecommerce, real world products, have a much longer value development cycle and making something lasting takes incredible resources, willpower, and deep reserves of patience.
Viral hits are like being a part of the NBA. Everyone wants to be on a great team but it’s less than .01% of the population that will ever achieve it.
“The Mac App Store isn’t a goldmine like iOS. Photo: Apple”
this part of the article/statement is particularly disturbing, seriously… i’ve had apps in top “categories” for some amount of time in both iOS and Mac app store, they make about the same thing. and it is no where near what people appear to believe.
typical downloads for a paid app that can rank in top 50 or top 20 in a category in a country will bring in between 15 to 35 units for a day, FOR BOTH iOS and Mac app stores. and that is for world wide sales. this depends on many things, but I had the situation of having the app in the same category on both platforms.
and what people are clearly not understanding is:, that is the same for top 5 or top 10, because that depends on how long they are in the top 5 or top 10, which I have seen personally. the days that I achieved this, the sales did not even double.
and for those of you who are consumers of apps, I’ll give you a very valuable hint… for free apps you get what you pay for, but for paid apps, I am going to guess that you are going to get far more than you paid for, in 99% of them….. if you do a simple check of the developer website, see if they are still dedicated to that app.
I’ve only actually bought a few apps of the App Store. And why? Despite Apple’s ‘efforts’ to do quality control and make the developer jump through hoops, there is a SHOCKING amount of crap on there. There are so many apps that either doesn’t work properly, or not working at all.
You also can’t search by price (something pretty much everyone looks at), and it would be much more useful if you could compare app features to make an informed decision about the app you’re forking out for.
If useful apps weren’t buried under a hundred bad ones, maybe more will be inclined to buy through the App Store. But sifting through the crap ones takes too much time.