The typical app makes almost nothing. Across the App Store and Google Play in 2026, the bottom half of earning apps bring in under $50 a month, and more than 80% never reach $1,000 a month. The headlines about $100M+ a year describe the top 0.1%. This article breaks the real distribution down by category, monetization model and stage. It draws on public filings, store reporting and our own dataset of 61,779 apps that have reached a top chart, which you can explore in our mobile app statistics.

So the honest answer to "how much money do apps make" is that it depends enormously on which app you mean. Below we go through the spread one slice at a time.

The Overall Revenue Distribution

App revenue follows a power law. Roughly, across all earning apps on both stores in 2026:

Percentile	Monthly net revenue (after store cut)
Top 0.1% (about 50 apps)	$1M+
Top 1%	$100K–$1M
Top 5%	$10K–$100K
Top 20%	$1K–$10K
Median (50th percentile)	under $50
Bottom 50%	$0–$50

The same shape shows up in every category, every store and every monetization model. It's the strongest pattern in app revenue, and most "how do apps make money" articles quietly flatten it.

Our own data shows how concentrated it gets. Among the 61,779 chart-reaching apps we track, 17.9% earn more than $1,000 a month and the top 1% collect 80.2% of all store revenue. Because those apps have all made a chart, they earn more than the store-wide table above suggests. The concentration at the top is the same.

Apple says $1.3 trillion in billings and sales went through the App Store in 2024 (Apple Newsroom, January 2025). Huge. And most of it still lands with a small number of apps.

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Revenue by Category

After stage, your category is the biggest factor in what you earn. Here are 2026 ranges for top-quartile apps in each category, after the store's cut:

Games, the highest-revenue category

Sub-category	Top quartile monthly revenue
Free-to-play mobile RPG	$500K–$50M
Casual hyper-casual (with ads)	$5K–$500K
Premium indie game (paid up-front)	$500–$50K
Match-3 / puzzle	$50K–$5M

Games bring in the most money overall, and they also have the widest spread. Bottom-quartile games make nothing.

Subscription productivity, the most repeatable indie category

Sub-category	Top quartile monthly revenue
Note-taking and writing apps	$5K–$500K
Calendar and time tracking	$2K–$100K
PDF / scanning utilities	$10K–$1M
Habit and goal tracking	$1K–$50K

This is where small indie teams most reliably build $10K–$100K/month businesses without an enterprise sales team.

Health and fitness

Sub-category	Top quartile monthly revenue
Weight tracking / calorie counting	$50K–$10M
Workout planners	$10K–$1M
Meditation / sleep	$50K–$5M
Period and cycle tracking	$20K–$2M

Revenue piles up in the top 5 apps of each sub-category. Below them, it drops off fast.

Finance and crypto

Sub-category	Top quartile monthly revenue
Budgeting and personal finance	$5K–$500K
Investment tracking	$10K–$1M
Crypto wallets and exchanges	varies wildly; exchange revenue often >$10M
Tax filing (seasonal)	$500K–$50M during Jan–Apr only

Photo, video, and creative AI

Sub-category	Top quartile monthly revenue
AI photo editors (post-2024 wave)	$50K–$10M
Video editors	$50K–$5M
Audio editing / podcasting	$5K–$200K
Camera apps	$1K–$50K

AI photo editors are the most volatile category in 2026. An app can reach $1M a month within 90 days of launch and collapse within the next 90.

Revenue by Monetization Model

Category aside, your monetization model sets how high revenue can go and how long the first dollar takes.

Subscription (most popular in 2026)

Subscription apps produce the most predictable recurring revenue, and they're behind nearly every indie success story from 2025 and 2026. Typical numbers:

Trial-to-paid conversion: 5–15% for consumer apps, 20–40% for high-utility B2B tools.
Retention a year after the first paid renewal: 50–80% for sticky tools, 20–40% for content-heavy entertainment.
ARPU: $30–$80 a year for consumer apps, $120–$600 a year for B2B tools.

At typical consumer pricing, a subscription app needs roughly 2,000–5,000 paying users to clear $10K a month.

In-app purchase (IAP) without subscription

IAP apps, mostly games and utilities with an unlock, earn per purchase rather than per billing cycle. Typical ranges:

Conversion: 1–3% of installers ever buy in consumer apps, 5–10% in games with deep IAP loops.
ARPPU: $5–$30 for utility unlocks, $30–$300 for games with deep IAP economies.

The math only works at high install volume. Apps under 100K installs rarely make more than $5K a month from IAP alone.

Advertising (ad-supported)

Ad-supported apps grow with daily active users and how many ads each user sees. As a 2026 rule of thumb, you need around 100,000 daily active users to make $50K a month from ads at typical mobile rates. Utility banners earn about $0.5–$3 per DAU per month, while casual games earn more per daily user.

For eCPM ranges, video-ad payouts, Android versus iOS and a worked estimate, see How Much Can an App Make from Ads in 2026?.

One-time paid

Paid-up-front apps are a niche in 2025-2026, under 5% of apps. The few that work keep earning steadily. Typical prices are $4.99–$19.99 for consumer apps and $29.99–$99.99 for prosumer tools. Sales volume is small, and so is the cost of maintaining them. Indie premium games like Mini Metro and the Monument Valley series are the classic examples.

Revenue by Stage

How long an app has been live affects revenue more than almost anything else.

Stage	Typical revenue
Pre-launch / first month	$0
Months 2–3 (organic install start)	$0–$500/month
Months 4–6 (first paid acquisition learnings)	$200–$5,000/month
Year 1 end (product-market fit zone)	$1,000–$50,000/month
Year 2+ (compounding)	$5,000–$500,000/month
Year 3+ (mature, sustained growth)	$20,000–$5,000,000/month

Apps that go on to make real money usually hit a turning point somewhere between month 6 and month 18. Either they pass $10K a month and start compounding, or they stay flat under $1K and the developer gives up.

How Store Cuts Affect Take-Home

Apple and Google both take a 30% commission on most transactions. It drops to 15% through the Apple Small Business Program and Google's equivalent for developers earning under $1M a year. Subscriptions also drop to 15% after their first year. Third-party billing options in the EU and Korea lower it further, but each needs its own setup.

Here's what you keep:

Gross monthly revenue	After 30% cut	After 15% cut
$1,000	$700	$850
$10,000	$7,000	$8,500
$100,000	$70,000	$85,000
$1,000,000	$700,000	$850,000

If you're under $1M a year, joining the 15% program can double your operating margin overnight. It's the step we see indie developers skip most often in their financial planning.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the average monthly revenue of a mobile app in 2026?

The median active app earns under $50 a month. The mean is far higher because a handful of apps at the top earn so much. For an indie developer the mean is close to meaningless, since almost no app actually earns it. The median is the more useful baseline.

How much do top apps make per month?

The top 50 apps worldwide each earn more than $1M a month, and the top 10 regularly pass $20M. Tinder, Candy Crush, TikTok, Disney+, YouTube, Duolingo and the big mobile RPGs live in this tier. The order changes from month to month, but the bar stays roughly where it is.

Can a solo developer make a living from app revenue?

Yes, but the path is narrow. In most US, EU and UK markets, a solo developer needs about $8,000–$12,000 a month in app revenue to match a senior engineering salary after taxes and self-employment costs. Getting there usually takes one of two routes: a subscription productivity app that compounds for 18-24 months, or 3-5 smaller utilities that each clear $2-3K a month. Ad-only solo paths almost never get to this level.

Which app category has the lowest competition for revenue in 2026?

Very specific B2B verticals and single-language utilities for non-English markets show the least competition relative to what they can earn. Examples include legal tools for solo practitioners, freight and logistics dispatch utilities, and productivity apps built for Turkish, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Polish speakers. Our profitable app niches guide goes deeper.

How much do free apps make compared to paid apps?

Free apps with IAP, subscriptions or ads earn over 95% of all mobile app revenue in 2026. Paid-up-front apps are much smaller in total, but each buyer costs less to acquire. Free wins on total revenue. Paid wins on simple unit economics and on the kind of audience it attracts. Our free vs paid statistics show how each model performs in our dataset.

Where does Sensor Tower / data.ai get their revenue estimates?

Market-intelligence platforms (data.ai has been part of Sensor Tower since 2024) combine public data such as Apple and Google reports, models built on panel data from users who install tracking apps, and sampling. Their estimates are most accurate for the top 100 apps in a country and least accurate for long-tail apps under 100K monthly active users, where panel models tend to underestimate. Every estimate, ours included, gets less precise at the long tail. Our methodology page lists our error bands by app size.

How much does it cost to build an app that makes $10K/month?

Build cost has little to do with eventual revenue. Apps that clear $10K a month range from solo weekend projects to teams that spent $500K before launch. Two costs actually predict whether you get there: (1) time spent improving the product after launch, typically 12-18 months of steady shipping, and (2) ASO and paid acquisition during the discovery window, typically $3-10K spread over months 2-6.

How do I estimate an app's revenue if I don't have Sensor Tower?

Take a revenue-per-download range for the category and monetization model and multiply it by a conservative install forecast. Our app revenue calculator does this with public benchmarks. Treat any single-app estimate under 100K MAU as a wide range, because panel models miss a lot at the long tail. See our methodology.

Methodology Note

The numbers in this article combine three kinds of sources:

Public filings and announcements from Apple and Google, plus revenue that indie developers have shared publicly on Indie Hackers, X and their own blogs.
The Trend Apps revenue dataset: 61,779 apps on the App Store and Google Play that have reached a top chart, with store revenue estimates refreshed after every crawl. Our methodology page explains how we estimate revenue and our error bands by app size.
Power-law analysis from public indie revenue disclosures, most notably Indie Hackers' revenue pages.

The ranges describe the typical top-quartile band for earning apps in each segment. Bottom-quartile apps in every category make much less, often nothing. We don't publish a single "average" figure because the distribution is too skewed for an average to mean anything.

Sources & Further Reading

Apple Newsroom, $1.3 trillion in App Store billings and sales in 2024
Apple Developer, Apple Small Business Program
Apple Developer, App Store Connect Help
Google Play Console, Service fees and developer programs
Indie Hackers Revenue Pages, publicly disclosed indie revenue
Statista, Mobile App Revenue Worldwide
Trend Apps, Methodology and data accuracy notes

Related research from TrendApps data

How Much Do Mobile Apps Make?: what share of tracked apps earns anything, what earners make, and how much the top 1% takes.
Free vs Paid Apps: Which Model Actually Makes Money?: free with IAP, paid, or both, and which model clears $1,000 a month.
Mobile App Revenue by Category: every category ranked by how often its apps earn and how much they make when they do.

Trend Apps tracks revenue, downloads and ranking velocity for 61,779 apps on iOS and Android. Start exploring the top-trending apps to see real revenue numbers for any category.

How Much Money Do Apps Make? (2026 Data, by Category and Stage)