Can I make money with an app?

Absolutely!
Most ideas can be profitable and the app market is so huge, sometimes even just the simplest of ideas turn out to be the best ones! There are several ways to "monetize" (make money) with a mobile app.

Let our experience with hundreds of apps help you navigate the best way you can earn revenue from your own custom developed app.

Here are a few common ways to make money with your app.

Paid apps

One is to simply charge for it. The network you are publishing through will usually take 30% of the sale, Apple and Google both do this. So if you sell and app for .99 cents, you net profit .69 cents of it. Not a bad margin considering you don't have to deal with handling the money, or distributing to the customer. If you sell 100 apps a day - you'll earn about $70 a day or $2170 /mo. It's pretty common to see these sorts of numbers with a decent app.

Advertisements

Another way to make money with an app is to use affiliate ad networks such as Admob and give your app away. People will download your app and while they are using it, they'll see an advertisement somewhere in the app window itself (usually on the top or bottom). When anyone taps the ad, you'll get paid. This model can be lucrative as well but it takes a large volume of downloads to gain substantial revenue because most ads only pay .05 - .10 cents per click. Overall if you have an app that receives 10,000 impressions to the users, and gets 300 ad clicks that generate .10 each - you'll earn $30.

Free-to-play / In-app purchases

A method growing in popularity is called the freemium model. This works by giving your app away but charging for upgrades or enhanced functionality within the app. This is also referred to as in-app purchases and in-app billing. An example usage of this method would be to have a game with 10 free levels, but 20 additional levels can be purchased directly from within the app itself. The same network profit sharing applies here too, but it is a very effective way to engage your app users for additional revenue while providing them more content.

There are many others ways that can earn you much more revenue with an app, ask us about your potential idea!