Which indie apps have gained the most revenue lately?

Which indie apps are actually adding the most revenue right now?

The biggest named recent indie-app revenue gains we can defend are Stella at roughly $340,000–$360,000 MRR within about two months and Halo AI at $300,000 MRR after only 45 days.

Several apps sit just below them. Sprout reached roughly $250,000 MRR within eight months, although its revenue later settled closer to $200,000. Sway AI reached a $2 million ARR run rate after six months, equivalent to about $167,000 per month if we simply divide the annualized figure by 12. BPM, a dating app for sporty people, has now reached roughly $140,000 MRR after only six months in France.

Flibbo deserves special attention because its growth is happening right now. Founder Sina Sinry first reported roughly $55,000 MRR, then crossed $100,000 MRR, and recently confirmed more than $100,000 of actual revenue over the preceding 28 days. Prayer Lock produced an even steeper jump from roughly $20,000 to $150,000 MRR, although its recent removal from Apple's App Store makes that revenue much harder to value as an ongoing business.

Those are the named apps we would put at the front of the current leaderboard. There are almost certainly bigger private examples. Nicole Cheung, for instance, said in a Starter Story interview that two additional apps she launched in stealth had already reached roughly $200,000 MRR each. We cannot rank apps we cannot identify.

App	Recent revenue growth we can defend	Time	Current read
Stella	~$0 → $340K–$360K MRR	~2 months	Clearest very recent breakout
Halo AI	~$0 → $300K MRR	45 days	Fastest documented ramp
Sprout	~$0 → $250K MRR peak	8 months	More recently around $200K
Sway AI	~$0 → $2M ARR	6 months	~$167K monthly run-rate equivalent
Prayer Lock	~$20K → $150K MRR	A few months	Huge gain, but App Store risk now dominates
BPM	~$0 → $140K MRR	~6 months	One of the freshest large breakouts
Flibbo	~$55K MRR → $100K+ actual monthly revenue	A few months	Still accelerating now

Why is this so hard to rank?

A perfect ranking of indie apps by recent revenue growth does not exist, because founders disclose different numbers at different times and many of the largest apps disclose nothing publicly.

MRR, ARR and actual monthly revenue are also easy to mix up. If an app reports $2 million ARR, we can say that equals a $167,000 monthly run-rate equivalent. We cannot say the app necessarily collected $167,000 during the last 30 days. Annual subscriptions make that distinction especially important.

Flibbo gives us a rare clean example. Sina Sinry explicitly said that his app had crossed $100,000 MRR and then separately announced that actual revenue over the previous 28 days had finally passed $100,000 too. Those are two different milestones.

Payment-verified databases help, although they cover only founders who choose to participate. TrustMRR currently shows PropGPT at roughly $72,000 MRR and about $83,000 collected over the previous 30 days, verified through Superwall. GoTall shows roughly $61,000 MRR from more than 17,000 active subscriptions. Some higher-revenue businesses on the platform remain anonymous.

The public leaderboard is incomplete in another obvious way. Nicole Cheung disclosed two unnamed apps at roughly $200,000 MRR each. Without their names, we can use them to understand how large the hidden part of the market may be, but they cannot answer a question asking which specific apps are winning.

For this article, we use “lately” to mean a meaningful revenue increase disclosed within roughly the past six months. Apps whose biggest milestone happened earlier can still be useful benchmarks, but we do not let an old $500,000 monthly figure automatically outrank a new app that just went from zero to $300,000.

Is Stella really the biggest recent indie-app breakout?

Stella is currently the strongest named candidate for the biggest very recent indie-app revenue gain, reaching roughly $340,000–$360,000 MRR only about two months after launch.

Sarah Perl built Stella around personalized affirmations and visualizations. In her recent Starter Story interview, the headline number was around $340,000 per month, while figures discussed around the interview put MRR closer to $350,000–$360,000. Stella also had roughly 12,000 paying customers and more than 200,000 downloads.

That conversion from audience to revenue happened at an extraordinary speed. At around $350,000 MRR and 12,000 paying subscribers, Stella was producing close to $29 of recurring monthly revenue per paying customer.

The unusual part of Stella's story is Sarah Perl's starting position. She already had roughly 1.2 million Instagram followers and 2.8 million TikTok followers. She had spent years learning which manifestation and self-improvement content people actually watched, saved and shared.

Stella's development was comparatively quick. Perl said an early version could be built in days with AI coding tools, with the full product taking a few months. The harder asset to reproduce is the audience she brought into the launch.

Stella is a great example of what has changed in consumer apps lately. Someone who already understands a large audience can now turn that knowledge into subscription software much faster than before.

Did Halo AI really go from zero to $300K MRR in 45 days?

Halo AI's jump to $300,000 MRR in 45 days is one of the fastest documented bootstrapped consumer-app launches we found.

Founder Dillion Verma described reaching the milestone after roughly 18 months of failed products. Halo AI eventually generated around 1.2 billion social views over 120 days through a network of approximately 85 creators producing about 300 videos per day.

The scale of that content operation is important. Halo did not depend on one lucky TikTok. Verma's team took a format that was converting and reproduced it across creators and platforms at enormous volume.

The financial risk was also very real. After a small TikTok experiment produced roughly six times its cost, Verma took out a $100,000 personal loan and pushed much harder into the channel.

The $300,000 figure becomes easier to understand in that context. Halo found a piece of content with measurable economics, then flooded the market with variations of it. The remarkable part is how quickly the system went from one promising test to hundreds of daily videos and nine figures of views.

Halo's public $300,000 MRR disclosure is less recent than Flibbo's latest revenue update, so we should not pretend it is a live dashboard today. It still ranks near the top because the jump itself was so large and happened in just 45 days.

Is Sprout still a $250K-a-month app?

Sprout reached roughly $250,000 MRR in eight months, but the best evidence we found puts its more recent level closer to $200,000 MRR.

Nicole Cheung described Sprout, formerly PrepearAI, reaching the $250,000 peak in her Starter Story and Superwall interviews. Later profiles based on the same founder material put current MRR around $200,000.

A decline from $250,000 to $200,000 is meaningful, but Sprout remains one of the largest bootstrapped consumer apps in this group. More interestingly, Cheung has already repeated the process several times.

Her earlier beauty app Glam Up reached about $150,000 MRR at its peak. She then pushed Sprout considerably higher. She also disclosed two newer stealth apps at around $200,000 MRR each only a few months after launching them.

That repetition makes the story stronger. One viral app could be luck. Four apps reaching six-figure monthly revenue begins to look like a founder who has learned how to manufacture distribution.

Cheung said her operation went from around 100 million monthly social views to roughly 400–500 million across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. At peak scale she was managing around 200 active creators.

Sprout itself may no longer be climbing through $250,000, but Cheung's overall app portfolio is still one of the clearest examples we found of a repeatable indie-app growth system.

Does Sway AI's $2M ARR really mean it makes $167K a month?

Sway AI reached a $2 million annual recurring revenue run rate within six months, which works out to roughly $167,000 per month as a run-rate comparison.

We should keep the wording precise because ARR can exaggerate how similar two businesses really are. A user paying $80 annually can contribute to ARR immediately even though the app did not collect $6.67 from that person each month.

Daniel Heintzman's Sway AI is still a major recent breakout. The app analyzes dating profiles and recommends changes to photos, prompts and presentation. Before building the software, Heintzman tested willingness to pay manually by charging $15 for dating-profile reviews on Instagram.

That sequence probably saved a lot of wasted development. People had already paid for the outcome before Sway automated it.

Sway then used highly repeatable TikTok slideshow content to scale. Heintzman also said a more motivational onboarding flow doubled revenue per user overnight, while extra photo products eventually contributed around 11% of revenue.

So we include Sway among the largest recent gains, while keeping its $2 million ARR label intact instead of quietly converting the number into supposedly verified monthly cash revenue.

Is BPM the newest app to break through $100K MRR?

BPM is one of the freshest major indie-app breakouts we found, growing from launch to roughly $140,000 MRR in about six months while operating only in France.

The speed becomes clearer when we reconstruct the curve. Founder Gabriel Zeitoun said BPM launched first and only introduced monetization several weeks later. About a month after turning subscriptions on, the app had reached roughly €11,000 MRR and was adding close to €1,000 of MRR per day.

A recent Tap & Swipe interview put BPM at a €1 million annualized revenue pace after about four and a half months. A subsequent App Masters interview described the business at around $140,000 MRR after six months.

Those disclosures suggest the app kept accelerating rather than simply hitting an early spike.

BPM is also interesting because it is a dating app, where a completely empty product has almost no value. Zeitoun started with a Paris running community and built a waiting list before trying to scale the software. The app reportedly had around 4,000 people waiting before launch.

Once the network existed, Meta became the main growth engine. The team began with tiny daily budgets and eventually increased spend roughly twentyfold as the economics held up.

BPM has a different shape from Stella or Halo. The product needed local user density, the first users came from an offline community, and paid acquisition took over once the dating network was useful enough to retain people.

Is Flibbo still growing fast right now?

Flibbo is one of the clearest apps still accelerating today, with founder Sina Sinry recently confirming more than $100,000 in actual revenue over 28 days after reporting roughly $55,000 MRR only a few months earlier.

Sinry also crossed $100,000 MRR shortly before actual monthly receipts reached the same level. That distinction gives us a much better picture of Flibbo than we get from a single annualized revenue screenshot.

The growth is increasingly paid. Sinry says he is now spending around $1,800–$2,200 per day across Meta and TikTok, or roughly $50,000–$60,000 over four weeks. His recent customer-acquisition cost has been around $18.

He also disclosed roughly $34,000 in net income after taxes and fees in response to questions about the economics. We should be cautious about comparing that figure directly with accounting profit, but it gives us more information than the normal founder post that stops at gross revenue.

Flibbo's current strategy is straightforward. Sinry tests content organically, identifies videos that get strong traction, and then puts advertising behind the winners. A recent organic video combined with paid amplification reportedly generated about $6,000 in sales in one day.

Among all the apps in this article, Flibbo has one of the freshest useful data points. The revenue milestone is happening now, and the founder is publishing both revenue and acquisition numbers rather than only celebrating an old peak.

Did Prayer Lock really jump from $20K to $150K MRR?

Prayer Lock appears to have grown from roughly $20,000 to $150,000 MRR within a few months, making it one of the sharpest recent revenue jumps we found, but the way it got there created a serious platform problem.

The app had already reached around $20,000 MRR before growth stalled. According to a recent teardown based on founder material and the app's onboarding, a redesign pushed MRR to around $60,000 within a month and then toward $150,000.

The redesigned funnel was extremely aggressive. It included subscription screens where the annual charge was much less prominent than the weekly equivalent, repeated downsells and promotional elements that followed users beyond the normal paywall experience.

Apple subsequently removed the app.

That sequence changes how we read the revenue chart. Going from $20,000 to $150,000 MRR is impressive mathematically, yet losing access to the App Store can wipe out the acquisition engine that supports the subscription base.

Prayer Lock still belongs in a ranking of recent revenue gains. We would give its $150,000 MRR much less weight than Stella's or BPM's revenue when judging how much durable business value was created.

Why doesn't QUITTR win if it makes $500K a month?

QUITTR is currently larger than Stella, Halo or BPM at roughly $500,000 per month, but its big jump happened earlier, so it does not answer the narrower question of which indie apps have added the most revenue lately.

QUITTR is still useful as a scale benchmark. Founder Alex Slater has described the business as bootstrapped, and the company's own site says it has no outside investors. The app helps users quit pornography and has grown to well over one million users.

The $500,000 monthly figure was already being discussed publicly several months ago. We found founder interviews from earlier in the year describing QUITTR at roughly that level. A current studio page connected with people involved in its growth still lists about $500,000 per month.

So QUITTR may well generate more monthly revenue today than Stella. Stella ranks higher for recent revenue added because its entire $340,000-plus monthly base appeared within roughly two months.

The same distinction removes several other giant names from the top of this particular list. Pingo AI approached $500,000 per month, but it joined Y Combinator. Coconote reached $6.7 million ARR before Quizlet acquired it. Cal AI became a tens-of-millions-a-year business before MyFitnessPal acquired it.

Those businesses show how high the ceiling can get. They simply answer a slightly different question.

Are $100K-a-month indie apps becoming normal?

Six-figure monthly indie apps are appearing often enough to feel common online, but RevenueCat's much larger dataset shows they remain extreme outliers.

RevenueCat's current State of Subscription Apps report covers more than 115,000 apps, over $16 billion in revenue and more than one billion transactions. Only 4.6% of newly launched subscription apps reach even $10,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years.

Just 1.7% reach $25,000.

The median successful app that eventually reaches $10,000 monthly revenue takes 109 days to get there. Halo reached thirty times that revenue in only 45 days. Stella reached more than thirty times the $10,000 milestone within roughly two months.

At the same time, the number of new subscription apps has exploded. RevenueCat counted roughly 2,000 new subscription apps per month four years ago and more than 14,700 per month by the beginning of this year.

The extra supply has barely shifted where most money goes. Apps launched before 2020 still collect 69% of subscription-app revenue in RevenueCat's data. Apps launched in 2025 or later collect only about 3%.

The flood of Stella-style founder stories can therefore create a badly distorted picture of the average outcome. We are looking at the extreme right tail.

RevenueCat benchmark	Result
New apps reaching $1K monthly revenue within 2 years	17.3%
New apps reaching $10K monthly revenue within 2 years	4.6%
New apps reaching $25K monthly revenue within 2 years	1.7%
Median time to $10K monthly revenue among apps that get there	109 days
Monthly subscription-app launches	14,700+
Revenue still generated by pre-2020 apps	69%

Are AI apps actually making more money now?

AI apps are currently monetizing users better than non-AI apps, although they are also losing subscribers considerably faster.

RevenueCat found that AI-powered apps generate 41% more revenue per payer. At the same time, their subscribers churn about 30% faster.

The pattern fits a lot of the recent winners. Halo gives users an immediate AI result that works perfectly in a short video. Stella creates personalized visualizations. Sway analyzes a dating profile. Sprout automates parts of a job search. Flibbo packages image, video, music and other generative tools into one consumer product.

These apps are easy to understand before somebody installs them. A creator can show an input and an output within seconds.

AI also gives founders room to charge aggressively because the product feels personalized. RevenueCat's data suggests consumers are indeed paying more for that experience.

Retention remains the weak point. Generating a surprising output once is easier than giving a subscriber a reason to keep paying every month. The 30% higher churn rate is a meaningful warning for apps whose revenue charts have only been visible for a few months.

We would describe AI as a powerful accelerator for recent app revenue rather than proof that these apps will automatically become long-lived subscription businesses.

Is UGC the common growth engine behind these indie apps?

Short-form content is the clearest common growth engine across the biggest recent indie-app winners we reviewed.

Halo built a network of 85 creators producing around 300 videos every day. Sprout's broader creator operation reached hundreds of millions of monthly views. Sway mass-produced TikTok slideshows. Stella had something even more valuable at launch: a founder whose existing audience already consumed exactly the kind of content the app turned into a paid product.

Flibbo has now turned organic content into a testing layer for paid acquisition. Videos that prove they can attract attention organically become candidates for Meta and TikTok spending. BPM followed a more paid-heavy path, but creative production became increasingly important as its Meta budget expanded.

The products themselves have little in common. One is about manifestation, one creates AI photos, one applies for jobs, one critiques dating profiles, one connects sporty singles and another packages generative AI tools.

Their marketing mechanics look much more similar than their products.

Each app has a result that can be understood almost instantly on a phone screen. That gives creators something concrete to film. High-volume content creates more chances to discover a winning angle, and the founders who can afford it then put money behind the formats that already work.

RevenueCat's market data helps explain why this skill has become so valuable. The number of apps being launched has increased about sevenfold. When thousands of products become easier to build, simply having a working app carries less advantage.

The recent winners have been unusually good at making people notice the app.

Are hard paywalls doing more work than founders admit?

Paywall design is contributing a huge amount to the revenue numbers behind today's fastest-growing consumer apps.

RevenueCat currently measures median download-to-paid conversion of 10.7% for hard-paywall apps versus only 2.1% for freemium apps by day 35. That is roughly a fivefold gap.

Retention is the surprise. After 12 months, RevenueCat sees about 27% retention for hard-paywall subscribers and 28% for freemium subscribers. Freemium produces far fewer initial payers without showing a meaningful long-term retention advantage in the aggregate.

Several founders in this article have reached the same conclusion through their own experiments. Nicole Cheung said moving a hard paywall directly after Sprout's onboarding increased conversion by roughly 50% compared with letting people explore first. Halo used two subscription offers in its onboarding rather than relying on a single generic screen. Sway changed its onboarding around user motivation and saw revenue per user roughly double.

Prayer Lock shows how far teams can push the same idea. Its reported move from around $20,000 to $150,000 MRR came alongside a much more aggressive onboarding and subscription flow, followed by removal from Apple's store.

There is a useful line between making the value obvious and making the price difficult to understand. The best operators are testing the first one aggressively. Crossing into the second can produce excellent short-term numbers and a terrible long-term outcome.

Which recent indie-app revenue gains look most likely to last?

Sprout, BPM and Pushscroll currently give us more evidence of durable revenue than the newest explosive launches, while Stella and Halo remain too young for us to be equally confident.

Sprout has already moved through a full growth cycle from launch to roughly $250,000 MRR and then toward a lower but still very large base. More importantly, Nicole Cheung has reproduced six-figure MRR across several apps. Founder repeatability gives us more confidence than one revenue screenshot.

BPM is young, but its curve has several healthy features. The team built a real user community before monetization, increased paid acquisition gradually and reported fast ad-spend payback. Dating also has natural recurring use when enough users exist in the same market.

Pushscroll is smaller at more than $100,000 MRR, yet the founders took roughly a year to reach that level and reported more than $1 million in cumulative App Store and Google Play proceeds. That longer track record is useful.

Flibbo is growing quickly right now, but its advertising bill has also become large. At roughly $1,800–$2,200 of daily ad spend, we care almost as much about acquisition cost and margin as the headline revenue number.

Stella has exceptional founder-owned distribution, which could make the business unusually resilient. We still have only a short revenue history. Halo has an impressive creator machine and reported margins around 50%, but the public $300,000 MRR figure comes from the early part of the app's life.

Prayer Lock sits at the bottom of this durability ranking after losing Apple distribution. A recurring-revenue base becomes much less attractive when the main source of new subscribers suddenly disappears.

App	Revenue durability today	Why
Sprout	Relatively strong	Longer history and founder has repeated the playbook
BPM	Promising	Community, paid acquisition and growing network density
Pushscroll	Relatively strong	$100K+ MRR after roughly a year, not a six-week spike
Stella	Too early to call	Huge founder-owned audience, very short revenue history
Halo AI	Too early to call	Powerful creator engine, but limited long-term retention evidence
Flibbo	Promising but ad-dependent	Revenue is rising fast alongside substantial paid spend
Prayer Lock	Weak	Store removal damages future acquisition

So which indie apps have gained the most revenue lately?

Yes, there is a clear group of recent winners: Stella and Halo AI have produced the largest named revenue ramps we could verify, while BPM and Flibbo are the freshest apps still showing strong acceleration now.

Stella went from launch to roughly $340,000–$360,000 MRR in about two months. Halo reached $300,000 MRR in only 45 days. As seen above, those two ramps remain unusually large even when we compare them with thousands of subscription apps rather than other viral founder stories.

Sprout reached roughly $250,000 MRR in eight months before settling closer to $200,000. Sway AI reached a $2 million ARR run rate within six months. BPM has now reached around $140,000 MRR after roughly six months in a single country. Flibbo recently crossed $100,000 in actual 28-day revenue after sitting around $55,000 MRR only a few months earlier.

Those figures also show why “biggest app” and “biggest recent gain” need to stay separate. QUITTR currently appears to be around $500,000 per month, yet it had already reached that scale months ago. Pingo also approached $500,000 per month, but it is YC-backed. Cal AI and Coconote became even larger before being acquired.

Against the broader market, these breakouts look even more extraordinary. RevenueCat finds that only 4.6% of new subscription apps reach $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years, even as nearly 15,000 new subscription apps are now launching every month.

What changed lately is the speed at which a very small team can turn distribution into revenue. Stella had a huge founder audience. Halo built an 85-creator content machine. Nicole Cheung has repeatedly built apps around hundreds of millions of social views. BPM combined an existing community with scalable Meta acquisition. Flibbo now uses organic videos to find ads worth spending money on.

The current indie-app winners are getting very good at the same thing: finding a simple consumer result people immediately understand, putting it behind an aggressive subscription funnel, and getting that result in front of enormous numbers of people.

Right now, Stella has the strongest claim to the biggest very recent named indie-app revenue gain. Halo is extremely close. BPM and Flibbo are the two we would watch most closely for the next update.