I Pulled the Median Earnings From Five Platforms Where Solo Builders Sell Their Work

Bottom line up front: on the four marketplaces, the median participant earns close to nothing. The top 1% of app publishers took 92% of all in-app purchase revenue in 2025, according to Sensor Tower. Written Word Media’s 2025 survey found 44% of self-published authors make $100 or less per month. The exception is ad revenue, which follows simple math, not luck: traffic times rate. A tech audience bills at roughly $12-35 per 1,000 pageviews, so a modest 100,000-page month pays what a mid-tier app earns in a good year. Sources and caveats below. Many “income report” posts quote averages, and averages here mislead.

Why medians, not averages

The Alliance of Independent Authors’ 2025 survey of serious self-publishers reports a median income around $13,500 a year, and an average above $80,000. Both figures are true. The average only gets that high because a few hundred big sellers pull it up. Plan on the median, then ask what moves you off it. On every platform below, the answer was the same: how many products you have, not how talented you are.

Amazon KDP

The numbers most newcomers read are the wrong ones. ALLi’s $13,500 median is for authors spending half their working time on books. The general picture from Written Word Media’s survey (n=1,346): 44% of authors earn under $100 per month, 8% clear $10,000. Catalog size explains most of the spread. Around 80% of authors with one to three books sit in the under-$100 band. Authors with 25-plus books show a median near $3,000 per month. A typical self-published book also costs about $2,300 to produce (editing, cover, formatting, per ALLi’s cost estimates), so the first book usually loses money.

Two more data points that decide strategies: Kindle Unlimited pays roughly $0.004-0.005 per page read, which means one complete read of a 50,000-word book is worth about a dollar. And authors with an email list earn a median of $300 a month against $15 for authors without one, a 20x gap. That is not a publishing statistic. It is a distribution statistic, and it applies to every platform in this post.

App Store and Google Play

Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 says consumers spent $167 billion on in-app purchases in 2025, up 10.6%, while downloads grew 0.8%. Money grew thirteen times faster than installs, and the top 1% of publishers took 92% of it. Everyone else with any tracked revenue split $13.1 billion. That is a small amount shared across a huge field of apps, so the median is far below the average.

For subscription apps specifically, RevenueCat’s annual survey of thousands of apps finds the median still under $50 per month after twelve months of life. TrendApps’ 2025 distribution analysis shows roughly 16% of tracked iOS developers and 21% of Android developers above $1,000 per month. But their sample comes mostly from teams that buy analytics tools, so the real cross-platform median is worse than those percentages.

Download quality differs too: TrendApps puts first-year revenue around $2.50 per iOS download against $0.70 on Android. That gap is why most solo devs I talk to launch on Google Play first as a cheap market probe and port the validated winners up to iOS. Microsoft Store, for completeness: the company publishes no developer revenue statistics at all, and that silence is the answer. Its one real feature is that PC apps may process their own payments at a 0% store cut. Use it as a port target when you already have your own traffic. Nobody browses it into a living.

One real change worth noting: 2025 was the first year non-game apps earned more than games ($85.6B against $81.8B), driven by AI subscriptions, with ChatGPT the third-highest-grossing app worldwide. Users now pay monthly for AI tools without hesitation. That is exactly the category a solo developer can build.

Google AdSense

This is the one place where more work means more money, and the link is direct. Revenue = pageviews x RPM / 1,000. Tech and SaaS content earns roughly $12-35 RPM according to publisher reports. Traffic from the US sits at the top of that range, and non-English audiences earn a fraction of it. Do the math: 100,000 pageviews a month at $15-30 RPM is $1,500-3,000. No launch window. No algorithm deciding whether you exist this season. No store taking 30% of what you charge.

Approval has no traffic minimum. You need original, crawlable text, About/Contact/Privacy pages, and patience, because search traffic grows over 6-18 months, not weeks. Two real problems. Google is a single point of failure: the August 2026 auction change cut RPM by 30-50% for some publishers overnight, and there was no one to appeal to. And AI answer engines take traffic at the source: searches that end in a chat window never load your page. The way to deal with that is to publish pages that AI cites, using data nobody else has. Numbers like the ones in this post.

The pattern

The marketplaces concentrate money at the top. Their medians sit near zero because visibility is the scarce thing, and the platforms sell that visibility to whoever pays for user acquisition. You can improve your odds with catalog size or a portfolio of launches. You cannot remove the luck.

Content and ads are different. The ceiling in any single month is lower than a hit app’s, but the work connects to the money directly. And the assets you build along the way, search traffic and the email list, stay with you when one platform changes its rules on you.

What this changed about how we build

We are keeping the app portfolio as probes. Each launch is a cheap experiment that tells us what people pay for. The main line, though, is what you are reading: publish the real numbers, keep the receipts, let the ad revenue and the inbound work grow slowly. One asset none of these platforms can take away: a reputation for data you produced yourself.

If your numbers disagree with mine, I want to see them. Write to me with your platform numbers, medians welcome, screenshots better. The best letters get published with permission.

FAQ

What does the median app earn? For subscription apps, under $50 a month after the first year (RevenueCat 2025). Most apps earn nothing trackable; the top 1% of publishers take 92% of revenue (Sensor Tower).

Is self-publishing on KDP still worth it? Only as a catalog business. Under five books, roughly 80% of authors earn under $100 a month. At 25-plus books, median rises near $3,000.

How much traffic does AdSense need for $1,000 a month? In tech, about 30,000-80,000 pageviews depending on RPM and geography. In consumer niches, several times more.

A note on sources: Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2026, RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2025, ALLi Big Indie Author Data Drop 2025, Written Word Media 2025 Author Survey, TrendApps 2025, and publisher-reported RPM ranges. Third-party and self-reported data; treat as direction, not gospel.