Abysmal revenue stats of 30K mobile apps show why devs keep pushing for subs

Enlarge / Apple’s App Store. (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Mobile app developers are expected to push subscriptions more aggressively over the next year. Numbers that RevenueCat recently shared examining over 30,000 apps suggest why: Most apps struggle to reach $1,000 per month in revenue.

RevenueCat makes a subscription toolkit for mobile apps. The 7-year-old company’s study shared today, as spotted by TechCrunch, said the firm examined apps using its in-app subscription SDKs. RevenueCat’s report didn’t list all apps studied but claims Reuters, Buffer, Goodnotes, PhotoRoom, and Notion as customers. The report claims that 90 percent of apps with an in-app-subscription platform use RevenueCat. The San Francisco-based company also claims to support “everything from niche indie apps to several of the top 100 subscription apps,” which notably suggests that most of the top-100 subscription apps aren’t included in this study.

With these caveats in mind, the 120-page report still provides unique details about a claimed $6.7 billion in subscription revenue touching over 18,000 developers and 290 million subscribers using the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.