

Top Grossing Finance Mobile App Generates Barely $80,000 Annually - vantech
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/canadas-top-grossing-finance-mobile-app-generates-barely-80000-annually-2012-07-16

======
ChuckMcM
Sigh, these things are so confusing. So this thing brings in $80K/yr, what are
the operating costs? Does it need a data base or backend support? Or is it
fire and forget? Did it take a year to write? 6 months? How much is spent
maintaining it?

I can believe that its impossible to 'grow a business' on the back of one $3
or $4 app. Except why would you only have one of those? And if its that hard
to write and maintain (so it takes an engineer full time to keep it going)
then selling it for $3 or $4 is just bad business. Apps that need an engineer
full time post ship are $20 apps.

~~~
randomdata
I was thinking along the same lines. $80,000/yr. of perpetual income for a
couple of months worth of work seems like a great deal.

However, I do feel the article is interesting from a user's perspective. If my
$3 purchase only nets the author a $80,000 income from a popular work, there
is little incentive for him to continue to work on the software. That means
I'm unlikely to see it improve or grow in ways that will continue to benefit
me in the future.

We've come to know continual product updates from not just software, but with
physical products too. Seeing that process disappear could come with an
interesting long-term impact.

~~~
jarek
It's highly unlikely that the income will be perpetual without additional work
put in to update the application and keep it fresh.

~~~
randomdata
You're right that it is not a safe bet. A lot will depend on how the market
shapes itself in the future. Though the income from my own app has remained
fairly constant over the years, despite the lack of updates and declining
rankings.

~~~
leviathan
Can you provide some data?

I also have a constant "income" from one of my apps, even though that income
is one $0.99 purchase every one or two weeks.

------
uptown
The actual title of article is:

"Canada's Top Grossing Finance Mobile App Generates Barely $80,000 Annually"

Isn't it likely that there are financial apps built in other regions that
gross more?

~~~
earl
yeah, unless the app is only useful in canada somehow, what about revenue from
other countries?

~~~
randomdata
The quoted revenue is not limited to Canadian sources, but the app reached the
rank of #1 only in Canada. It did, however, make the Top 5 in the US, UK, and
Australia, according to the article.

------
phil
Here's a chart of their Canada rankings:
[http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/budget-with-back-in-
black/ra...](http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/budget-with-back-in-
black/ranking/history/#view=grossing-
ranks&start_date=2011-06-30&end_date=2012-07-16&store_id=143455)

Looks like they only do well in English-speaking markets, so they'll mostly
live and die by their US performance. So it's more accurate to call them the
#75 finance app (that's about where they seem to hover). $80k/yr to be number
75 in your biggest market doesn't seem quite as bad.

An interesting question is: why are they #1 in Canada? In the US, there are
dozens of better selling budget trackers. What's different about Canada?

------
TheFuture
Last time I looked the top 7 grossing apps were free. They make money with in-
app purchase.

<http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/gros/?device=iphone>

I think it's very difficult to make decent money charging upfront for a mobile
app that is to appeal to a broad market.

------
martinshen
I don't see why this is such a surprise? The app does not appear terribly
complex nor does being #1 in Canada really mean anything.

~~~
majani
Is that sarcasm? I honestly can't tell.

------
nodemaker
As a data point, my app for reading hackernews (<http://www.hackerno.de>) is
one of top apps for Hacker News priced at $2.99.

It barely makes $350 a month.With that revenue there is very less incentive to
spend time and do updates.But nonetheless I still give it some time.I guess
other devs likewise are motivated by other things than money.

~~~
nicholassmith
Do you mind if I ask how long it took to make it? If it was a reasonably small
amount of time $300 a month for a year or so is a nice little earner.

~~~
nodemaker
Hi Nicholas...Please shoot me an email and I will be happy to give you more
details...nodemaker@gmail.com

------
bradly
I know title editing is a frowned upon here on HN lately, but this is pretty
misleading. It is the top grossing finance app just in Canada (which is how
the post is title on techvibes).

------
dtwhitney
Off the top of my head...

While mint.com isn't entirely a finance app, it was sold for $170 million. I'd
assume that price would not have been paid if it were only grossing $80k/year.

Also Bloomberg has a free app that's pretty awesome. It's hard to peg how much
revenue that app is responsible for bringing in, but regardless, I'm sure it
adds more than $80k/year of value to the company or they'd can it.

------
coryl
1) The app looks like it could be done in 8-12 weeks if not less. The result
of an $80k/year in passive income is well worthwhile. (This doesn't account
for marketing + other costs if any, but is probably still a net gain).

2) How big of a market do they think personal expense accounting apps is?

~~~
nanijoe
Every App looks like it could be done in 8 weeks, until you actually try to do
it.

~~~
coryl
That's true enough, but who cares. Double the development time to 24 weeks.
Its still winning.

------
SiVal
I find it difficult to parse all these financial factoids about what
percentage of apps "break even" or "can support a standalone business" etc.
How are these things defined? Does break even include paying the programmer?
How much? Or is the programmer working at his own expense but hoping to repay
himself from future revenues? Okay, repay himself how much? Probably all of
the revenues minus expenses, but what expenses and for how long before
declaring that it did or didn't break even?

I wish purveyors of this data would simply provide annual gross revenue per
app for each percentile ("top-grossing 1%", next 1%, next 1%, etc.), and let
ME decide whether that revenue would or wouldn't "break even" or be
"sufficient to support a standalone business".

Has anyone seen such data?

~~~
saurik
Gross revenue is meaningless without taking into account those other factors:
an app that took two weeks to develop and an hour a week from one developer to
maintain that makes $1m in annual revenue would be amazing; but, if it took a
year to develop and requires a team of five to maintain, then one would
presume it is losing money (and a lot of it, possibly very rapidly).

I can thereby understand asking for both sides, so you can do the subtraction
yourself, but if I was going to see either the result of someone performing
the subtraction or just one of the numbers being subtracted, I'd have to say
only the former provides value; this is certainly true of you want to break
them up into brackets: the top 1% by revenue might be losing money while the
middle third are raking it in.

~~~
SiVal
I would, of course, be happy to have a fully itemized accounting database, but
the way it is, undefined "making money" or "breaking even" etc. doesn't give
me anything at all that I can use. Having an undefined mishmash of revenues
over an unspecified time (per year? since release? discounted cash flow
anticipated forever?) minus who even knows what, and announcing just the
result of comparing undefined values to undefined values, is not more
informative than a simple top line gross revenue number.

You're clearly correct that annual revenues per app without the costs it took
to achieve those revenues is not all you would like to know. It's only one
piece of relatively well-defined data, which you would have to supplement with
your own estimates, based on looking at lists of popular apps and estimating
what it would take to create them, of what it would take you to produce
something similar.

But having just the results of how often an undefined value exceeds another
undefined value is not more information than one well-defined value; it is
less.

Now, of course, if they were to provide much clearer definitions of their
terms ("breaking even", etc.), and give us some assurance that the developers
who answered the questionnaires were quite clear on those definitions (not as
certain as simply, "how many dollars per year does the store send to you for
that app?), then we would both probably be happier with the data.

------
watmough
At peak, my app FemCal was making about $1500 / month, or almost 1/4 of this
top app, and I never broke about 130th place in the app store.

Don't add up to me.

------
acabal
How are people not impressed by this? The app is making almost twice the
median national income, and people are saying it's not enough? Come on.

~~~
eric_bullington
Yes, but the whole point is that this is a _top selling_ app among many
thousands, and it's only making $80,000. I would guess if you take the average
selling app of its category, you would find that it's making much less than
$40,000.

That said, unless this is a massively complex app (which I doubt), it really
should take much less than a developer man-year. Plus, I'm guessing that this
$80,000 is the net revenue, after they've paid their developers.

Still, it's not exactly inspiring for those of us starting to do mobile app
development.

~~~
infinii
"net revenue" doesn't account for salaries. You're thinking of "net profit".

~~~
eric_bullington
You're absolutely right. I tend to mix these two terms up, even though I
recognize the difference between the two. Good thing I didn't go into finance.

------
dxbydt
This is not a "Finance App". It's an expense tracker. It manages your personal
finances. A Finance App would be Bloomberg Mobile (on Android, IPhone) - it
tracks equities, commodities, bonds, currencies & futures + news reports on
everyday events in the world of uh... Finance.

~~~
jorgem
Personal Finance?

------
nicholassmith
I'm not sure what living costs and so on are like in good ol' Canadia but $80k
seems like a huge chunk of cash to make annually off one app, that works out
about £51k GBP which is some serious cash for someone in the UK.

Whilst I'm sure there's plenty of devs toiling away making next to nothing I'm
going to guess there's another set who are making reasonably solid amounts of
money as a supplemental income to their main jobs, or enough money to justify
doing it. You only ever hear about the wild million dollar success stories, or
the stories of woe. The inbetween? Not so much.

------
tonetheman
80k is a lot most people in the US do not make even close to that. Be happy
you made something people pay for. Now do it again.

------
RandallBrown
I worked on a sports app that is regularly at the top of sports category for
paid apps. It does not make enough to support the team that is working on it
yet.

If I remember correctly, we were making ~$250 a day and were in the top few
thousand apps in the store. The VAST majority of developers make almost no
money at all.

------
vantech
True - not a "finance" app but that is how it is categorized in the App Store.

~~~
eric_bullington
"Personal finance". That's been what this type of software is called since the
early days of Quicken several decades ago.

------
dsirijus
I'd imagine it has something to do with best finance apps being sponsored by
interest groups (banks, online payment vendors, credit card companies etc.)

------
moepstar
Barely, you say...

------
programminggeek
If the app was built and has had minimal work to improve it, $80,000 annually
would be awesome. If one dev is working full time to improve it, then it's not
amazing. If you have a team of 10 devs building this app, you're doing
something wrong.

------
mandeepj
" Alas, it's the harsh reality: most app developers face serious struggles and
the 59% of app developers don't break even from their apps."

This is bull crap. Angry birds have made multi million dollars. Finance in
itself is a dull category. They should start something like "paint your mouth"
kind of app :-)

~~~
cageface
My friend won the lottery. People that say it's a waste of money are full of
shit.

~~~
mandeepj
Well you caught something that is clearly lying there and down voted me but
missed what I was trying to say. I gave just one example and hoped you will
use your brain to find more. Most of the apps are crap so developers are
reaping what they are sowing but at the same time if they try to do some good
work like instagram, card.io, draw something, socialcam and there are lot more
of them which got sold for multi million or even billion of dollars. That
article was very demotivating and I still say it is full of crap. lesson for
you - What you see sometimes is not reality.

With down votes people are trying to say that they are saving the world but
they don't try to get the message that other person is trying to give

~~~
cageface
I almost never down vote and didn't down vote you.

Plenty of very good apps make no money. The world will be a better place when
people understand basic statistics.

