People sometimes ask us if Paint my House makes money. It does now, but it took a while. And the costs are probably not what you'd guess.
Just publishing an app is not free. Google Play has a one-time $25 developer fee. Apple charges $99 per year to keep your app on the App Store. So if you're on both platforms, which you kind of have to be, you're spending money before anyone even downloads the thing.
Where the money goes
Developer fees are nothing compared to user acquisition. We run ads on Google Ads and Apple Search Ads to get people to find the app, and there are months where we spend more on ads than we make back. You're basically betting that a user you pay to acquire today will generate enough ad revenue through AdMob over the next few months to justify the cost. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you watch a campaign burn through budget and have to kill it.
And then there's all the small stuff. Crash reporting, analytics, backend services, fixing bugs on random Android devices you've never heard of, answering support emails at 10pm. Individually none of it costs much but we probably spend a few hours every week just keeping Paint my House running, not even improving it.
Revenue
We make money from in-app purchases on Google Play and the App Store, plus ad revenue from AdMob. The annoying part is that all of these report in different dashboards with different delays, so for a long time we genuinely didn't know if we were profitable in any given week. We use Apps Finboard now to see it all in one place, which we should have done way earlier.
With about 305,000 downloads, Paint my House is profitable. Not life-changing money, but the app covers its own costs and makes some extra on top. Getting there was stressful though. The first few months we were pouring money into ads with almost nothing coming back. It did eventually flip but at the time it felt like it might not.
Is it worth it
Honestly, if you calculate the hourly rate for the time we've put in, it's pretty bad. But at this point the app mostly runs itself. People find it through app store search, revenue trickles in, and we just keep it updated. So the ongoing effort is low. If you're thinking about making an app just know that the costs are real and breaking even takes longer than you'd expect.
If you want to try exterior paint colors on your house before buying, Paint my House does exactly that.