Which iPhone apps make over $10K/month now?

Which iPhone apps are definitely making over $10K a month now?

There are plenty of iPhone apps making more than $10,000 a month today, and some surprisingly small ones are doing it alongside TikTok, ChatGPT and the other giants.

At the very top, Appfigures estimated that TikTok generated about $300 million in after-store-fee mobile revenue in one recent month. ChatGPT was around $201 million, while Google One reached roughly $94 million. YouTube and CapCut were also among the five largest mobile earners worldwide.

Those numbers tell us almost nothing about what a small app can achieve, though. The more interesting evidence sits much further down the chart.

3AK Track & Field, an iPhone training app for competitive runners, currently shows about $11,100 in MRR and more than $14,000 of recent 30-day revenue through a RevenueCat-verified account on TrustMRR. It has roughly 3,300 active subscriptions.

Draft AI, an iOS app that turns voice notes into social-media content, has recently been showing roughly $32,000 in 30-day revenue and around $25,000 MRR in the same verified database. An anonymous AI makeup app available on iPhone and Android is around $51,000 in monthly revenue and roughly the same level of MRR. A private health-and-wellness iOS app listed there is considerably larger again, with recent monthly revenue above $100,000.

STFU gives us a useful borderline case. The iOS and Android social app recently generated about $12,800 in 30 days, although its normalized MRR was closer to $9,300. That distinction becomes important later.

So when we ask which iPhone apps make $10K a month, the answer reaches much further down than the usual App Store leaders.

App	Recent revenue evidence	What the evidence shows
TikTok	~$300M/month	Appfigures estimated after-fee mobile revenue
ChatGPT	~$201M/month	Appfigures estimated after-fee mobile revenue
Google One	~$94M/month	Appfigures estimated after-fee mobile revenue
Private health & wellness iOS app	~$132K/30 days	RevenueCat-verified marketplace data
AI makeup app	~$51K/30 days	RevenueCat-verified marketplace data
Draft AI	~$32K/30 days	RevenueCat-verified marketplace data
3AK Track & Field	~$14K/30 days	RevenueCat-verified marketplace data
STFU	~$12.8K/30 days	RevenueCat-verified marketplace data

Is making $10K a month actually common for an iPhone app?

No. A $10,000-a-month iPhone subscription app is still an unusually successful app, even if founder Twitter and acquisition marketplaces can make that level look almost routine.

RevenueCat's latest subscription-app study covers more than 115,000 apps and over $16 billion of revenue. Among newly launched subscription apps, only 4.6% reach $10,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years.

That means roughly 95 out of every 100 launches fail to reach the threshold during that period.

The distribution gets even more revealing lower down. Only 17.3% of new subscription apps reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within two years. Around three quarters of the apps that manage to get to $1,000 never make the jump to $10,000.

We also need to account for what people choose to show publicly. Developers announce hitting $10K MRR because it is an achievement worth announcing. Nobody writes a long thread when an app has been making $83 a month for six months.

The public sample is heavily distorted toward winners.

So $10K is attainable enough that we can find many real examples, but rare enough that reaching it puts an app deep into the successful tail of new subscription businesses.

When someone says an iPhone app “makes $10K a month,” what does that actually mean?

“$10K a month” can describe very different iPhone businesses, so we need to know whether we are looking at cash collected, recurring revenue or estimated App Store spending.

Take STFU. Its RevenueCat-connected profile recently showed roughly $12,800 collected over 30 days, while MRR was about $9,300. Saying that STFU “made more than $10K this month” is accurate. Saying it has more than $10K MRR would currently be wrong.

The reverse can also happen.

An app with a large annual-subscription base may have $20,000 of normalized MRR while collecting much less cash during one particular 30-day window. Renewals do not arrive evenly throughout the year.

Then there is another distinction at the top of the market. Appfigures commonly estimates what an app earns after Apple and Google's store fees when it publishes its highest-grossing rankings. Other analytics firms sometimes report gross consumer spending instead. A $20 million gross-spending estimate and a $20 million developer-revenue estimate are different claims.

For the rest of this article, we treat an app as clearing $10K when recent evidence shows either more than $10,000 of actual revenue during roughly the past month or more than $10,000 of current recurring monthly revenue.

We do not treat an old viral launch month as proof that an app still makes that amount today.

Can a tiny niche iPhone app really make more than $10K a month?

Yes. A tightly focused iPhone app can currently clear $10,000 a month without having anything close to a mass-market audience.

3AK Track & Field is one of the clearest examples because the product is so narrow. It targets sprinters, distance runners and serious track athletes. TrustMRR's current RevenueCat connection shows roughly 3,300 active subscriptions, about $11,100 MRR and around $14,000 collected over the latest 30-day period.

The founder says the app reached approximately $100,000 in cumulative revenue in under six months and did so at roughly 80% margins. Its App Store listing has around 1,600 ratings rather than hundreds of thousands.

A second verified mobile business on TrustMRR solves a personal, emotionally driven problem. The company does not publicly disclose the app's name, but the live RevenueCat numbers are unusually useful: roughly 3,600 active subscriptions, about $28,400 MRR and around $25,800 of recent monthly revenue.

There are also niche products operating between those two levels. A profitable Japanese-learning iPhone app recently showed roughly $12,000 collected over 30 days, although its recurring MRR was lower because its revenue mix includes purchases that do not behave like standard monthly subscriptions.

These businesses are small by consumer-internet standards. They can still generate six-figure annual revenue because the paying audience only needs to number in the low thousands.

Which types of iPhone apps are most likely to reach $10K a month?

Gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, consumer AI and apps attached to an urgent personal problem keep appearing disproportionately among iPhone businesses that reach meaningful subscription revenue.

RevenueCat's current data gives us the broadest view. Gaming has the highest share of new subscription apps reaching $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years, at 8.9%. Photo & Video follows at 7.3%. The average across all categories is 4.6%, while Business apps come in far lower at 1.6%.

The individual apps help explain those category differences.

3AK sells performance improvement to athletes. Cal AI sells easier calorie tracking. The anonymous makeup app sells personalized AI-generated looks. Project A, a mobile astrology and fortune-telling product with more than 50 million reported downloads, currently shows around $63,000 MRR and about $81,000 of recent monthly revenue in its RevenueCat-connected marketplace listing.

These apps tend to give the user something personal and immediate. Improving your appearance, losing weight, running faster, getting entertainment or receiving personalized advice is easier to attach to a consumer subscription than a feature somebody might open twice a year.

Business apps can absolutely charge much more per customer, but getting a self-serve business app from launch to meaningful consumer-style volume is harder. RevenueCat's 1.6% success rate at the $10K threshold makes that gap fairly stark.

Category	Share reaching $10K monthly revenue within two years
Gaming	8.9%
Photo & Video	7.3%
All categories	4.6%
Business	1.6%

Is AI the easiest route to a $10K/month iPhone app right now?

AI has produced some of the fastest-growing iPhone apps around, but simply adding AI has become one of the easiest ways to enter an overcrowded category.

The ceiling is obviously enormous. ChatGPT is generating hundreds of millions of dollars a month through mobile stores. Cal AI surpassed $30 million in annual revenue and 15 million downloads in under two years before MyFitnessPal acquired it. Draft AI is currently around $25,000 MRR in verified RevenueCat data. The anonymous AI makeup app mentioned above is around $51,000 MRR.

Even within the same broad category, though, the gap between winners and ordinary apps is huge.

TrustMRR contains plenty of RevenueCat-connected AI mobile apps sitting at a few hundred or a few thousand dollars a month. Gluely AI, for example, has tens of thousands of users according to its marketplace profile but recently showed roughly $1,600 MRR. Nsketch AI, another AI image-and-video product, was around $600 MRR despite reporting about 50,000 users.

The winning AI apps are generally doing more than offering access to an underlying model. Cal AI gives the camera a clear job: point it at food and get a calorie estimate. The makeup app lets somebody see a personalized look on their own face. Draft AI turns messy spoken thoughts into something publishable.

The user understands the result before having to understand the AI.

“AI-powered” barely narrows the field anymore. The better question is whether the app uses AI to solve a problem people already care enough about to pay for repeatedly.

How many paying users does an iPhone app need to make $10K a month?

An iPhone app can reach $10,000 a month with only a few thousand active subscribers, and sometimes considerably fewer if pricing is high enough.

3AK currently gives us a useful real-world ratio. Around 3,345 active subscriptions support roughly $11,100 of MRR. That comes to only about $3.30 of normalized monthly recurring revenue per active subscription, partly because the app mixes weekly, monthly and discounted annual plans.

The unnamed personal-problem app looks different. About 3,623 active subscriptions support roughly $28,400 MRR, or about $7.80 per active subscription.

STFU recently had just 784 active subscriptions. Its MRR was below $10,000 at roughly $9,300, but actual revenue collected over the previous 30 days exceeded $12,000. Its revenue per active subscriber is therefore much higher than 3AK's.

Raw download counts can be badly misleading for small iPhone businesses. An app does not need one million monthly active users if a thousand or two thousand people are willing to pay meaningful amounts.

Pricing changes the arithmetic dramatically. RevenueCat's current dataset shows a very wide difference in realized lifetime value between inexpensive and high-priced subscription apps. At the one-year point, high-priced apps generate several times the payer value of low-priced ones.

A developer can reach the same $10,000 with a large base of cheap subscriptions or a much smaller group of valuable customers.

Example	Active subscriptions	Approx. MRR	Approx. MRR per active subscription
3AK Track & Field	~3,345	~$11.1K	~$3.30
Private consumer app	~3,623	~$28.4K	~$7.80
STFU	~784	~$9.3K	~$11.80

Can a simple iPhone app still make $10K a month?

Yes. The product itself can still be simple, although getting enough people to discover and pay for a simple app is getting harder.

3AK has a very understandable job: help track athletes train and improve their performance. Puff Count, which became a well-known independent-app case before being sold, helped people track and stop vaping. Cal AI made calorie logging easier by asking the user to photograph food.

None of those products requires a long explanation.

That simplicity can help monetization because the person encountering the app immediately understands what might improve in their life. The problem comes one step later: competitors understand it too.

There are thousands of calorie trackers, habit apps, fitness tools, AI photo apps and screen-time blockers in the App Store. Building another one has become much easier with AI coding tools and cross-platform frameworks.

A simple idea needs unusually good execution somewhere else. 3AK has built a recognizable position within track and field. Puff Count used a large stream of short-form content around vaping. Cal AI became exceptionally good at creator-led distribution.

Simple products can still make a lot of money. Simple products with no distribution advantage usually disappear into App Store search results.

Does launching on iPhone really make $10K easier than launching on Android?

Yes. Subscription apps still monetize new iPhone users much more efficiently than Android users at the point where a download turns into a payment.

RevenueCat's current dataset puts median day-35 download-to-paid conversion at 2.6% on Apple's App Store versus 0.9% on Google Play. That is nearly a threefold difference.

The revenue-per-install gap points the same way. Median revenue generated within 60 days of an install is about $0.42 on the App Store versus $0.16 on Google Play.

The interesting part is what happens after somebody has already agreed to pay.

One-year realized lifetime value per payer is much closer: roughly $23.38 for App Store subscribers versus $21.62 on Google Play. Trial-to-paid conversion is also almost identical once users actually start a trial.

Apple's advantage comes heavily from getting more downloaded users into the paying funnel in the first place.

The platform mix shows how powerful that effect becomes. Depending on developer geography, roughly 66% to 75% of subscription-app projects in RevenueCat's dataset receive more than 80% of their store revenue from iOS.

For a small consumer developer trying to get to the first $10,000 a month, that concentration is hard to ignore.

Can an iPhone app make $10K a month without spending heavily on ads?

Yes. Some current iPhone apps are over $10K with little or no paid acquisition, although they usually replace advertising spend with a lot of content and niche distribution work.

3AK's founder says most growth has been organic. The app currently spends only about $50 to $100 a day on Meta advertising, while Instagram, TikTok and its position in the track-and-field niche do much of the acquisition work.

STFU is even more direct. Its founder states on the RevenueCat-verified marketplace listing that the app has no ad spend and minimal operating costs. The company uses Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and recently collected roughly $12,800 over 30 days.

Older examples show how far that approach can go. Puff Count's founder publicly described making hundreds of TikTok videos about vaping and quitting. The app eventually exceeded $40,000 in MRR before it was sold.

Organic growth is possible, but “organic” does not mean people randomly found the app.

Someone still has to create the TikTok videos, own the niche, rank for the search terms, build an audience or find some other repeatable way to put the product in front of the right people.

The expense can show up as founder time rather than an advertising invoice.

How fast can an iPhone app realistically reach $10K a month?

For the small minority of subscription apps that eventually reach $10,000 a month, getting there can happen in only a few months.

RevenueCat measured a median of 109 days from launch to $10,000 in monthly revenue among apps that successfully reached the milestone. Gaming winners move even faster, with a median of 53 days.

That statistic has an important selection effect. It only measures apps that actually made it.

As seen above, fewer than one in twenty new subscription apps reaches $10,000 a month within its first two years. The typical launch therefore does not spend 109 days slowly climbing toward $10K. Most launches never get there.

The breakout examples can move extraordinarily quickly. 3AK says it generated roughly $100,000 of cumulative revenue in under six months. Cal AI went from launch to more than $30 million of annual revenue in less than two years.

This creates a strange distribution: the winners can look almost absurdly fast, while the median app remains tiny.

If an iPhone subscription app has genuine product-market fit and a working acquisition loop, we can often see it within months rather than waiting several years for the business to reveal itself.

Can one viral month make an iPhone app look more successful than it really is?

Absolutely. A $10K or even $30K month does not automatically mean an iPhone app has built a $10K recurring business.

STFU gives us the cleanest current example. Recent 30-day revenue was around $12,800, while MRR sat closer to $9,300. It cleared $10K in cash revenue but had not yet established a $10K normalized subscription run rate.

Other marketplace listings show much wider gaps. A Japanese-learning iPhone app recently generated around $12,000 over 30 days while showing roughly $5,000 of MRR. The revenue is real, but the business should not be described as a stable $12K-MRR subscription product.

Annual renewals, lifetime purchases, launch promotions and temporary traffic spikes can all create this effect.

The reverse is possible too. An app with lots of annual subscriptions might show relatively weak cash collections during one month while still having a subscription base worth considerably more when normalized.

For current comparisons, the cleanest evidence is when both numbers clear the threshold. Draft AI recently had roughly $32,000 in 30-day revenue alongside about $25,000 MRR. The anonymous makeup app was around $51,000 on both measures. 3AK currently has roughly $14,000 of recent revenue and $11,000 MRR.

Those businesses give us much more confidence that $10K is an ongoing level rather than a lucky month.

Has AI coding actually made $10K/month iPhone apps easier to build?

AI coding has made iPhone apps dramatically easier to produce. It has also made attention harder to win.

RevenueCat says the number of new subscription apps launched each month climbed from roughly 2,000 a few years ago to more than 14,700. Around 77% of those newer launches are on iOS.

That is an enormous increase in supply.

Yet the revenue has not migrated toward new apps at anything like the same speed. Apps launched before 2020 still generate roughly 69% of subscription revenue in RevenueCat's dataset. The newest cohort takes only a small share.

We can see the same problem at the app level. Building an AI image generator, productivity tool or subscription wrapper no longer requires an unusual engineering team. RevenueCat marketplaces now contain hundreds of competent-looking apps doing less than $1,000 a month.

The scarce part has shifted toward distribution, retention, positioning and knowing exactly what someone will pay for.

An experienced solo founder can now build in weeks what might previously have required several developers and months of work. Thousands of other founders received the same improvement.

AI coding has improved the odds of getting an iPhone app into the store. It has done much less to improve the odds that anybody cares once the app gets there.

Are older iPhone apps still taking most of the money?

Yes. Despite the flood of new AI-built apps, older subscription apps currently capture most of the revenue.

RevenueCat finds that apps launched before 2020 still account for about 69% of subscription revenue in its dataset.

That result makes sense once we look at what an established app accumulates: years of reviews, App Store ranking history, brand searches, backlinks, subscribers who renew, creator relationships and a backlog of product improvements.

A new app can copy features much faster than it can copy those assets.

The top of the App Store shows the same persistence on a much larger scale. TikTok has remained around the top of global mobile revenue rankings for years. YouTube, Tinder, Google One and other long-established products continue to occupy the highest-grossing charts despite the huge wave of new AI apps.

Newcomers can still break through. ChatGPT did it at enormous scale, and Cal AI did it inside a narrow consumer category.

Those are valuable examples precisely because they are exceptions strong enough to overcome incumbency.

The market still rewards new apps that create a genuinely better acquisition loop or product experience. A cleaner interface alone is much less likely to dislodge an app that has spent five years accumulating distribution.

So which iPhone apps really make over $10K a month now?

Yes, many iPhone apps are making more than $10,000 a month right now, and the threshold includes far more than famous apps from huge companies.

At one end, TikTok, ChatGPT, YouTube, Google One and other global apps earn tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a month through mobile stores.

The more useful finding is what happens further down. Current RevenueCat-connected data shows Draft AI at roughly $25,000 MRR, an anonymous AI makeup product at around $51,000, a private consumer subscription app around $28,000, and 3AK Track & Field at roughly $11,000. STFU has also recently collected more than $10,000 in a month, although its recurring MRR remains just below the line.

These examples cover AI content creation, beauty, personal problems, sport and social interaction. There is no single winning app category.

What repeats is more practical: a problem somebody immediately understands, enough willingness to pay, a subscription or purchase structure that can generate meaningful revenue per user, and a repeatable way of reaching those users.

The difficulty should not be understated. Only 4.6% of newly launched subscription apps reach $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years, and the App Store is receiving vastly more new subscription apps than it did a few years ago.

So $10K/month is clearly achievable for a small iPhone app today, sometimes with only a few thousand paying users and a tiny team. It is still a real breakout threshold. Shipping the app has become cheap. Getting enough people to keep paying for it is still the hard part.