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Maybe not rich, but if 5000 people buy a $5 app that you spent 30 hours on, that's a pretty good ROI for your time.
by navait 11y ago
Maybe not rich, but if 5000 people buy a $5 app that you spent 30 hours on, that's a pretty good ROI for your time.
- patmcguire 11y ago"Redacted, which peaked at No. 2 on the Mac App Store, sold 1,845 copies through May 19 and earned $6,600" That seems to be a low ceiling on success, no?
- navait 11y agoMaybe I just have low standards for success, but $220^H^H^H160/hour sounds pretty good to me. Also if it's sucessful on mac app store, a $2 version on iOS/android might be viable.
- allsystemsgo 11y agoWell, you also have to take out Apple's cut (30%), plus taxes.
- xienze 11y agoThat's not bad for a passive income stream, and for only having spent 30 hours on it.
- pidg 11y agoAnd for an app that just lets you selectively blur out bits of images. GIMP can do that in seconds, for free. It's indicative of the state of the App Store that there are so many apps like this. The worst culprits - in my view - are 'distraction-free text editors'. I guess if the market is there for a $20 text editor that does nothing, then people are going to try to exploit it.
- bdcravens 11y agoI seriously doubt you could design, develop, prep, submit app, and market for 30 hours and have anything that anyone would download for free, let alone pay $5 for. The sheer volume of users doesn't obviate the fact that there's a minimum level of quality for discoverability to kick in.
- suby 11y ago30 hours is the amount of time the author of Redacted claims to have spent developing the app.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- DrJokepu 11y agoI have actually done exactly that. Twice. If I can do it, anyone can.
- hellbanner 11y agoMind sharing? I didn't see apps on your site.
- DrJokepu 11y agoI don't want to get into specifics because I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. The first one was a developer tool priced around $10, the second one was a more generic IT productivity tool priced around $5. They've both made around $10-15K over the years. In the end I had to abandon them because sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development didn't seem to stop that.
- bdcravens 11y ago(responding to child comment) > I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. > sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development So there were obvious support and continued development costs, so I expect that the true hours you'd add to the ROI calculation are well more than 30.
- marvel_boy 11y agoAn app in 30 hours? Believe me that this is not the usual time it takes to build an app !
- thebouv 11y agoThat's not what all the articles and media are telling me. I can spend almost no time on an iOS app and make myself rich. Even kids can do it. According to the hype. So it must be true.
- Karunamon 11y agoI'd be curious where you're getting any kind of hype that states "I can spend almost no time".
- thebouv 11y agoI'm curious how you haven't seen any miracle articles of the kids who just learn iOS programming in a week, spend a few hours on a game, and make serious cash. For the longest time those were coming out weekly, which always made my boss say "Why can't we do that?"
- prawn 11y agoExactly. You can spend 30 hours just preparing screenshots in various languages and device sizes, preview video and so on.
- xienze 11y agoPeople are also forgetting that the time spent writing an app in your free time is "fun", or should be. I program in my free time for fun, getting paid after the fact is gravy. Getting paid $6600 for 30 hours of fun time (or so he says) is awesome.
- outworlder 11y agoYeah, if you have no expectations at all of getting paid (like, say, Wozniak), a check is a very good surprise. However, since you are jumping through the hoops to get your app approved, you are expecting (or hoping) to get paid to some degree.