Many are making less than $1000 a month
I think Sturgeonâs Law may apply here.
âNinety percent of everything is crap.â
How many apps are there? How many are actually work paying for?
The comments for the Ars Technica article are worth a read.
In the first paragraph it mentions that this is a survey of 'âover 75,000â mobile apps, âŚ".
Consider a $10 per month subscription, $120 per year. For a developer to gross $50K a year, they would need 417 subscribers.
For 75,000 apps to make $50K a year there would need to be 31,275,000 total subscribers.
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IMHO, this is due to the difference between simply building an app as an indie versus building a business that happens to have an app as one of its products.
Iâve listened to some fairly large indie app developers boasting how they donât do marketing, promotion, or any of the other ugly âbusiness stuffâ that they deplore.
Too many still cling to the field of dreams motto âif you build it, they (customers), will comeâ
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After reading the article, I found the comments to be a mixed bagâsome were, to put it mildly, quite harsh, while others offered reasonable perspectives. This forum has already hosted numerous discussions on app subscriptions, so Iâll steer clear of rehashing those debates here.
The article left me with mixed feelings. I almost feel guilty for my reluctance toward subscriptions. 
I genuinely sympathize with app developers striving to earn a living or supplement their income without exploiting users. The issue extends beyond app subscription fatigue; itâs the sheer volume of subscriptionsâstreaming services, apps, internet, even certain car featuresâthat becomes overwhelming.
I will try to adopt a more generous approach to app subscriptions. However, the app must clearly meet my needs, not just be a nice-to-have.
Take Ulysses, for example. Itâs a fantastic app with excellent features like a built-in grammar and style checker, outlining capabilities, a comprehensive document library, glue and merge functionalities, and feature parity across platforms. If any app warrants a subscription, Ulysses certainly qualifies. Yet, despite my appreciation for the appâit is a joy to useâseveral factors make it challenging for me to justify paying for a subscription.
Non-Standard Markdown Complications: Ulysses employs its own form of Markdown, Markdown XL, which enhances its capabilities but creates challenges during export to standard Markdown. This can result in feature loss, somewhat undermining the advantages of Markdownâs âfuture-proofing.â
Data Backup Concerns: Ulysses stores its backup files locally. If the local library becomes corrupted and the Ulysses backups are inaccessibleâsay, due to disk failureâthe risk of losing all my work is significant, especially if my external backups (two external drives and Backblaze) also fail. Unlikely, I know. While Ulysses allows for exporting the entire text library, enabling storage on external drives or cloud services for additional protection, as stated above, the files are not in standard markdown, and therefore, I lose some of what I embedded in the Ulysses sheets.
Decision Against Subscription: After alternating between Ulysses and other writing apps more times than Iâm willing to disclose , I decided to cancel my subscription. Despite being an excellent app, the subscription lock-in, coupled with unresolved Markdown export issues, doesnât justify its continued use for me.
My purpose is not to start a discussion about Ulysses, there are already threads on that. That said, Iâm always willing to be corrected and convinced otherwise. 
While I recognize the value of supporting quality apps through subscriptions, the tools I choose must align with my specific needs and workflows. My point is that developers have an uphill battle in convincing people to subscribe and stay subscribed. I donât envy them.
Unfortunately, too many developers find themselves with Sisyphusâ curse.
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I donât mind subscriptions but I canât easily commit to the same tools, especially when Apple apps are doing well enough, simple enough. More functionality wonât make me feel more valuable because I will need to spend time looking into the ways I can make use of. No fun!
I will need to try using or even pay a month to see, but I found that it will take a long time for me to settle. Wasting too much time on better tools, and reviews mostly canât fit my situations.
For me I am more willing to subscribe entertainment like Apple Music or MUBI because I can easily get rid of if I need.
That said, I still donât like subscriptions because I feel like paying same thing repeatedly. When I travel, I donât want myself to stay in the same chained hotel. Sometimes is okay but not every time.
And I realize that tools canât boost my productivity and creativity but changing my lifestyle and habits can. Rest, travel and eating well can help. I canât stand for the subscription of productivity tools.
I realize that tools canât boost my productivity and creativity but changing my lifestyle and habits can. Rest, travel and eating well can help.
Well said!
Canât you just switch it to standard Markdown if you want the futureproofing?
It would wager itâs also about financial planning. Iâve known people in business who make $10,000, and they spend the $10,000 - now theyâre barely squeaking by. Some sort of recurring revenue helps balance that out. In my own business, I bill certain services yearly, and I put customers on one of four quarterly intervals. It helps to keep the revenue consistent throughout the year.
Without beating the dead horse of subscriptions, I personally try to look at it as value for money rather than payment frequency/methodology. If I buy an app from a dev for $50 and I expect to get three solid years out of it, that app is de facto worth $16.67 per year to me.
Therefore if they offer me a $16.67 yearly subscription, thatâs more than fair. $20 probably isnât even out of the question. Itâs when the â$50 for three yearsâ app goes to â$50 for one yearâ that the wheels come off for me, because thatâs not about predictable revenue as much as it is about a 200% price hike. 
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Certainly, but then there would be little reason to use Ulysses, Iâd just use an app like iA Writer.
The other day some people on CNBC were discussing who is making money from Artificial intelligence. And right now Itâs not the researchers, itâs the people supplying the researchers.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, people rushed to the gold fields hoping to make a fortune. Some struck it rich, others made a decent living, and some found nothing at all. But the people selling the âpicks and shovelsâ were almost guaranteed success. Some of those businesses like Levi Strauss and Wells Fargo are still around.
The Apple App Store is todayâs gold field. Developers go there hoping to find success. And some do, but most barely make a living. And others make nothing.
But Apple is almost guaranteed success. As long as they can keep the competition from opening another store.
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From a business standpoint, recurring revenue is king because it actually provides a somewhat stable income and allows you to continue to develop and improve a product.
For most things the old days of an app getting a new version every year or two is dead. Itâs all about continuous updates now. Iâd argue thatâs better for the user from a feature perspective.
Honestly I think Apple is partially to blame for the decline of single-purchase software. When the iPhone app store launched and they were promoting $0.99 apps as the future it changed the economics of software development quite a bit. You need to sell to a lot of people at that price to make any money. And yeah, a lot of people have iPhones, but itâs way easier to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones.
There are plenty of other reasons to prefer subscriptions. A $100 one-time purchase feels a lot more daunting than $10 once a month. Users can also try for a short time without feeling the need to commit.
The other big reason is cloud costs - if your app/software has some service that incure server/database costs you NEED recurring revenue. And everyone these days wants everything synced across every device they own.
The simple truth is that most developers went to the subscription model because they make more money that way and can build a better product with sustainable and predictable income. Thereâs a reason every top grossing app is a free app with paid subscriptions and not a paid app. The market doesnât lie.
The reason 90% of software makes less than $1000/mo is because most software just isnât very good.
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The only software I pay sub for is 1Password and I have a 50% off for 3 years special and a $125 for $100 gift card special used. Even then itâs a heavy lift to spend $3 a month even for this brilliant app.
I also pay for iCloud+ and Inoreader, the only other âdigital subsâ
I also sympathize with me striving to not erode my income too.
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If that app subscription will bring me noticeable improvement at work or significant progress in a personal project, Iâm all for it. Anything that makes me life easier is a blessing.
I do an evaluation every year to juggle my subscriptions. It depends on what projects I have going on.
Iâm grateful to be able to turn off a monthly subscription when I no longer need it.
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CBS News recently reported that according to a new report, that surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. adults about their ability to handle a surprise bill, . . . found that 59% of Americans in 2025 donât have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense.
I wonder if part of the subscription problem is people who purchase more hardware than they need, and upgrade it more often than is necessary?
That is a very good analogy. 
I think this applies from the dev side as well. For devs, I think there can also be at least perceived pressure to own/maintain more generations of âtesting devicesâ than one would otherwise logically need, and/or âspec upâ new devices beyond where it would otherwise be strictly necessary. At Apple markups, that can get expensive quick.
Related, I remember Marco talking about all of the Kindles he used to own when he did InstaPaper. A similar collection of Apple devices would be massively more expensive. 
Your âgold rushâ analogy is spot on. John Scarne once said, âyou canât buck the house cut.â When youâre playing poker, the âhouseâ takes a small percentage of each hand. Over the course of the night, even if no new money is appearing at the table, the house makes out very well - no matter how well you do.
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Just wait until the new generation of AI coded native apps invade the AppStore!
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The way this survey is reported always drives me nuts, haha. That question on Bankrateâs survey doesnât ask if they have the money, just how they would choose to handle the expense.
This question is closer to asking who doesnât have $1k. Still not a great percentage, but itâs lower.
(Link to survey: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/ )
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Like you said, it may be about financial planning. When people are enthusiastic about something, there is a temptation to spend more money on it than is necessary.
Computers were part of my job since IBM released the first PC. So I only owned two PCs before I bought my first Apple device, a Power Mac, in 2003. And with the exception of an iPad, I didnât buy another computer until I retired.
But donât ask me how much I spent on cameras and dive gear over the years. 
I understand. And when you ask people about money their answer will most likely depend on how they are feeling about it at that moment.
Someone who has just been told they are getting laid off, or are having another child, will probably have a different answer than they would have given yesterday.
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