| Making Money From Subscription Apps |
| Wednesday, 02 April 2025 | |||
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The findings of RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps Report show wide discrepancies in revenue potential between the top percentile of apps and the rest. Travel and photo apps are best earners. RevenueCat's mobile app subscription toolkit is used by indie-sized teams to large publishers. Its newly published report is based on data from over 75,000 apps across all categories (e.g., Health & Fitness, Productivity, Education) which equates to more than $10 billion in revenue across more than a billion transactions. The report looks into the hurdles of gaining any revenue at all from an app starting with conversion rates.The first step along the road to making money from a Subscription App is to get users to convert downloads into trials. Note that the chart below goes from 0% to 25% - in other words the best performing apps don't succeed in tempting more than a quarters of those who download the app to accept the offer for a trial prior to taking out a subscription.
RevueCat points our that conversion rates are better for Business, Health & Fitness, and Productivity apps, that is ones with strong habitual use cases. On the other hand, impulse-driven categories like Gaming and Media & Entertainment see lower conversion rates. The report also comments: High-performing apps significantly outperform the median, proving the impact of strong onboarding and paywalls. In most categories, the top 10% convert downloads to trials at double or triple the median rate. An important finding was that across all categories, the vast majority of users start a trial immediately upon download, with conversion rates exceeding 80% on Day 0 suggesting that paywall placement and first impressions are critical to driving trial adoption:
Turning to the percentage success of converting to a paid subscriber, travel apps have the highest median trial to-paid conversion rate at 48.7%, closely followed by Media & Entertainment at 43.8% which the report claims: suggests that users in these categories find immediate value, likely due to strong content offerings or time sensitive utility.
While Health & Fitness apps have a median of 39.9%, the top 10% convert at 68.3%, one of the highest. This suggests that habit-forming features, community engagement, or premium content can drive stronger conversion outcomes in this category. The report also reveal that longer trials see better conversion rates: Trials lasting 17–32 days have the highest median conversion at 45.7%, suggesting that more time to experience value leads to stronger purchase intent. When it comes to retaining subscribers the research finds that shorter trials see the highest early cancellation rates with 3-day and 7-day trials have the highest Day 0 and Day 1 cancellations, suggesting that users may feel rushed to decide or may cancel preemptively to avoid being charged before exploring the app. In the case of longer trials cancellations are distributed over a long time scale. RevenueCat comments: This suggests users take more time to evaluate, but a longer trial alone isn’t enough to prevent churn —engagement remains key. So how possible is it to earn a living from Subscription Apps? The report has a lot of data and I've selected two of its charts.
The Revenue per Install (RPI) data reveals significant differences in early monetization across app categories. Health & Fitness apps dominate with a median RPI of $0.44 with the top percentile achieving of $2.97. Business ($0.29) and Education ($0.27) apps also perform well while Gaming ($0.08 median) struggles. Looking at the percentages of Apps that achieve the Revenue targets they had set themselves within their first two years, notice that only one bar rises above 25% and that across all categories, less than 20 percent reach $1,000 in revenue, and only 5 percent reach the $10,000 mark.
On a more positive note for the apps that do achieve success, the median number of days to reach $1,000 is 60, i.e. 2 months, with Gaming apps having the best performance - 32 days (1 month) to $5,000 and 46 days to $10,000. It's just a shame that this success is only gained by 10.19% and 7.73% of the apps respectively. There's a great deal of scope for failure and disappointment. More InformationRevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2025 Related ArticlesBusiness Apps - An Untapped Developer Opportunity Google To Pay $90 Million To Devs - But It's Not Enough App Store Or Google Play? Where To Earn Money From Apps Revenue Generation For Mobile Platforms To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 02 April 2025 ) |
The highlight of this chart is that Photo & Video have the highest success rates, with 27.57% reaching $1,000 and 8.75% hitting $10,000 within 2 years.