LiveCode Forums

If you put a free App on the App Store, wait for a while to get up in the rankings, and then put a price on it, the stats of the rankings get to zero? or not?
I saw that "Wheres my Water?" was free for a while, it hit the top 1 on Games, and now it is for sale again....

In Austin, some developers are making apps for domain experts and putting them in the iTunes Store for free. No one gets paid until the app is downloaded and used, and the user clicks on ads that go along with the app. Then the developer and the domain expert split the revenue from the ads 50/50. I have not seen this work YET, but then I'm not in Austin anymore.

How about in the rest of the world? Does the system work the same way too?

I have heard mostly of doing it the other way around. First starting with a paid version and dropping to free after a while. The upside is that since there are many sites that monitor the cost of apps and will feature you once you change to free. Many of the top grossing apps make their money by in app purchases rather than the initial price of the app.

Is there a source of this kind of revenue information that is free we could use in a business plan?

I don't think the information is public, although you can check out something like Trey Smith's blog: http://www.treysmithblog.com/ for some examples of what an iOS game can make.

Much easier to estimate the revenue for a app that does not have in app purchases as you can look at android store and times downloads by price for the android store revenue.

Interesting, but he is a salesman. The data he quotes encourages us to buy his products, so might not be what I'd want to base a business plan on.

Trey smith definitely is a salesman but at least his data does give you an idea of what kind of revenue you can be making with such apps. Estimating revenue is probably the easiest for apps that are either free with ads or just a single purchase since you can estimate the amount of downloads or buys and times it by average CPM or the price of the app. However, most revenue is made with in app purchases which is much more difficult to estimate.

In my studies of entrepreneurship, I have found that making a business plan for a new business is rarely something accurate. As long as you have some basis for your numbers you are good. Also I have seen some business plans have different scenarios like if your product sells worse than expected, as expected or better than expected.