How Much Do Apps Make? Revenue by App Store Chart Rank (2026)

In short: A handful of apps make millions a month, and most make close to nothing. By Searvia's estimates, the number one app on the US top grossing chart takes in about $114 million a month in gross consumer spending, #10 about $32 million, #100 about $5 million and #200 about $2.8 million, with smaller countries scaled down sharply. Out of that gross, Apple keeps 15% to 30% and taxes come off before you are paid. Below the charts, a subscription app's typical monthly revenue one year after launch is under $100.

The question "how much do apps make" has two honest answers. At the top of the charts, the numbers are enormous. For the typical app, they are small. This guide gives you both: a rank-by-rank revenue table you can use to size any market, the math to turn gross revenue into what you actually keep, the formulas for subscriptions and ads, and a method to estimate a competitor's revenue yourself.

App revenue by top grossing rank

Apple publishes top grossing charts for each country and category, but not the revenue behind them. To translate a rank into money, Searvia uses a curve: chart position in, estimated daily gross revenue out. The full method, inputs and limits are on our method page. In short:

• US #1 on the overall top grossing chart (iPhone) is set at about $3.8 million a day in gross consumer spending.
• Down to #20 the curve is flat (revenue falls with rank^-0.55), because the leaders earn similar amounts. Beyond #20 it falls faster (rank^-0.9).
• Other countries use the same curve, scaled by the size of their market compared with the US.

These are Searvia estimates as of October 2026, not reported figures. The model is not yet calibrated against real sales, so read every number with its range: half to double in the top 50, a third to three times beyond.

United States: overall top grossing (iPhone)

Same rank, other countries (monthly gross)

How to read the tables

1. These are overall charts. Category charts are not on this curve. Being #5 in Weather or Reference can take a small fraction of what #5 overall takes. Searvia scales each category chart daily from the apps that appear in both that category chart and the overall chart.
2. One country at a time. An app's worldwide revenue is the sum of its countries. An app at #100 in the US, #50 in the UK and #50 in Germany is roughly $5.2M + $0.87M + $0.67M, about $6.7M a month, plus every country not listed.
3. Use the median rank over weeks. Grossing ranks swing with promotions, renewal days and weekends. A single day's position can mislead by a lot.
4. The tail is the long part. If an app does not appear in the US overall top 200, the table suggests it grosses less than about $90K a day there. That upper bound is often the most useful number you get.

The downloads side works the same way on the top free chart. Our starting assumption, from older third-party benchmarks and therefore weaker than the revenue side, is about 150,000 downloads a day at US #1 free, 42,000 at #10, 12,700 at #50 and 6,800 at #100.

A sanity check against the whole market

Do these numbers add up? According to Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch, consumers spent an estimated $155.8 billion on apps and games worldwide in 2025, up 21.6%, and about $55.5 billion in the US across both stores, roughly $152 million a day. Searvia's curve puts the US top 1,000 grossing positions at about $90 million a day for the App Store alone, which is in line with that once you account for Google Play and the long tail.

Apple's own figure is much larger and measures something else. Apple says the App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025, but digital goods and services, the part that resembles "app revenue", totaled $149 billion. The rest is commerce that apps facilitate, and Apple says more than 90% of the total involved no commission. Do not quote the trillion figure as app revenue.

Gross is not what you keep

Every revenue number above is gross: what users pay, before the store's commission, taxes and refunds. What lands in your bank account is proceeds.

Apple's commission

• Standard rate: 30% on paid apps and in-app purchases.
• Small Business Program: 15% if your proceeds (sales net of commission and certain taxes) were no more than $1 million in the previous calendar year and stay under it this year. Proceeds from associated developer accounts count together. You must enroll; it is not automatic. If you pass $1 million during the year, the standard rate applies to future sales.
• Subscriptions after year one: you receive 70% of each billing cycle during a subscriber's first year of paid service and 85% after that. Free trials do not count toward the year. If the subscription lapses and the user returns after more than 60 days, the clock resets.
• Regional rules: developers on Apple's alternative terms in the EU get further reduced rates, and on the US storefront, guideline 3.1.1(a) no longer stops apps from including buttons or links to outside purchase methods. Model your actual storefront mix.

Google Play's service fee

Google is midway through a change. According to the Play Console Help page on service fees, as of October 2026:

• In most markets: 15% on the first $1 million a developer earns each year, 30% above that, and 15% on auto-renewing subscriptions regardless of revenue.
• In the EEA, UK and US (from June 30, 2026) and Australia and Japan (from September 30, 2026), a new structure applies: auto-renewing subscriptions pay 10% plus a 5% billing fee, while other purchases depend on whether the user first installed before or after the rollout date and on program enrollment. Check the live table for your case.

Worked example: from gross to proceeds

Take a hypothetical habit tracker, Streakly, which grosses $40,000 in a month, mostly subscriptions, from a mix of countries where prices include VAT.

1. Remove taxes. If the weighted VAT in its markets is around 15%, about $34,800 is the pre-tax price ($40,000 / 1.15).
2. Apply the commission. In the Small Business Program, Streakly keeps 85%: about $29,600. Without the program and with mostly first-year subscribers, it would keep about 70%: $24,300.
3. Subtract refunds and chargebacks, then your own costs: servers, AI inference if you use it, subscription tooling, ads.

The same $40,000 "revenue" is a $24,000 to $30,000 business before costs. When you read a revenue estimate for any app, including on Searvia, remember it is the top line.

Why most apps make little

The chart tables describe winners. The typical app lives far below them.

RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026, built on over 115,000 apps and more than $16 billion in revenue, reports:

• The cross-category median monthly revenue one year after launch is about $72. The middle 50% of apps sit between $16 and $429 a month; the top 10% make $2,500 or more.
• Only 17.3% of newly launched apps reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within two years, and only 4.6% reach $10,000.
• Apps launched before 2020 still generate 69% of all subscription revenue.

That sample is apps that already use a subscription platform, so it leans toward people who tried to monetize. Apps without any monetization are not in it at all, which makes the real picture for "all apps" lower, not higher.

Three reasons explain most of the gap:

1. Distribution, not product, is the bottleneck. An app nobody finds earns nothing. Search ranking, featuring and paid acquisition decide who gets downloads.
2. Conversion compounds. Each step from download to trial to paid to renewal loses most of the users. A small change at each step multiplies.
3. Old apps hold the ground. Incumbents have ratings, brand searches and years of subscribers renewing. A new app competes for new users only.

How apps make money: the formulas

You do not need industry averages to estimate your own revenue. You need the right formula and your own inputs. Every input in the examples below is hypothetical; replace it with yours.

Subscriptions and in-app purchases

First-cohort revenue = downloads × trial start rate × trial-to-paid rate × price

Streakly gets 1,000 downloads in a month. Suppose 6% start a trial of the $39.99 annual plan and 45% of those convert. That is 1,000 × 0.06 × 0.45 = 27 subscribers, or $1,080 gross. Revenue per download for that cohort is $1.08 gross, about $0.92 after a 15% commission, before taxes.

Then add what happens next. Annual plans renew (or not) in 12 months; monthly plans churn every month. Lifetime revenue per download is the cohort's total revenue over its whole life divided by its downloads, which is why per-download numbers you read online vary so widely: they mix different time windows.

A trap when reading competitors: dividing an app's monthly revenue by its monthly downloads overstates revenue per download, because this month's revenue includes renewals from users who downloaded long ago.

Ads

Ad revenue = impressions ÷ 1,000 × eCPM, and ARPDAU = daily ad revenue ÷ daily active users.

Suppose Streakly's free tier has 10,000 daily active users who each see five ads a day: 50,000 impressions. If your ad network reports an eCPM of $4, daily ad revenue is 50 × $4 = $200, about $6,000 a month, and ARPDAU is $0.02.

The $4 is an input to show the arithmetic, not a benchmark. eCPM changes by country, ad format, season and fill rate, so take it from your mediation dashboard after a few weeks of real traffic. The lever most people underestimate is DAU: ads only pay at scale, which is why ad-funded apps usually need many more users than subscription apps to reach the same revenue.

Paid apps

Revenue = downloads × price. Simple, but paid apps forgo the free download that feeds search ranking and trials, so volume is usually lower. Many developers combine a free download with a one-time unlock instead.

How to estimate a competitor's revenue yourself

You can get a defensible range with public data and an afternoon.

1. Record its grossing ranks daily for two to four weeks. Note the overall and category positions in each country that matters. Use the median, not the best day.
2. Convert ranks with the tables above, country by country, then add them up. Write the result as a range, not a point.
3. Check the price points. The App Store product page shows in-app purchases and subscriptions, up to 20 items. A $9.99 weekly plan and a $29.99 annual plan imply very different subscriber counts for the same revenue.
4. Cross-check with ratings growth. Count new ratings per month. Compare with your own app's ratio of ratings to downloads; it varies a lot between apps, so use it only to catch estimates that are off by an order of magnitude.
5. Look for numbers the owner published. Founders often share MRR in interviews and on social media, and some publish verified revenue. A verified number beats any model, including ours.

Searvia does steps 1 and 2 for you. Every day it records the App Store top grossing and top free charts, overall and in 25 categories, and turns each app's positions into estimated monthly revenue and downloads per country, with the range shown. Visitors see a rough bracket on each app's public page; signed-in users, including on the free plan, see the estimate and each country. See App revenue estimates for what is covered, and the Discover apps guide to filter by country, category and release date. If you want to see young apps that already earn, New winning apps lists App Store apps released in the last six months that reached the grossing charts.

Two limits to keep in mind: the estimates are for the App Store only (Google Play revenue is not estimated), and only apps in the top 100 of an overall or category chart in the covered countries get an estimate.

Why verified numbers beat models

Any rank-based model, ours included, is an estimate built on assumptions. The way to make it better is real data. Searvia's model is being calibrated against App Store Connect sales reports that developers contribute anonymously; once a country has at least three apps, the calibration results and median error will appear on the method page.

The Verified revenue leaderboard goes one step further: it shows apps whose owners connected RevenueCat, Adapty or App Store Connect and chose to publish their real revenue. When you are sizing a niche, start from the verified numbers you can find, then use estimates to fill the gaps.

Common mistakes when reading app revenue numbers

• Quoting gross as income. Take off taxes, the 15% to 30% commission and refunds before you compare an app's revenue with a salary.
• Treating a category rank as an overall rank. #3 in a small category may be a modest business.
• Using one day. A launch, a sale or a featuring can lift an app for a week.
• Ignoring countries. Many apps make more outside the US than inside it, or the reverse.
• Trusting a single point estimate. If a tool shows one number without a range, ask how wrong it can be.

See what apps in your niche make

If you are deciding what to build or sizing a competitor, open New winning apps to see which young apps already earn, then sign up free to see the estimate, its range and every country for any app in the charts. For your own app, connect App Store Connect, RevenueCat or Adapty and Searvia shows your real revenue instead of an estimate, and you can publish it on the Verified revenue leaderboard when you are ready (how to do it).