Phone apps sold through app stores
These are mainly iPhone and Android apps. Apple or Google collects the payment in the app and keeps a commission. All of them sell subscriptions.
Phone apps sold through app stores holds 61 of the 252 stories on Aiolum: 31 run by a solo founder and 30 by a team of 2 to 10. Together they report US$80M in verified outcomes; the largest is Cal AI, Sold to MyFitnessPal, price not disclosed, December 2025. 38 headline numbers carry evidence grade A (disclosed or verified), 2 grade B (independent press) and 9 grade C (founder claim), and 12 are grade D (reported, not verified). The median story reached its headline number 14 months after launch. The founders are in 30 countries, most often USA and United States. The most common main channel is creators and short videos (24 of 61). The tools named most often in their sources are Apple App Store (60), RevenueCat (38) and Google Play (35).
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The revenue trend compares the latest months in the sources with the months before them. Falling means revenue is about 15% or more below the best recent months, or the sources report a fall. The headline number is the yearly figure or the sale value on each card.
61 of 252 stories shown
It reached the App Store early, in July 2023, with the simplest form of the idea: press one button, get a transcript and a summary. The founder paid for Meta ads while they still worked for a new kind of app, tested paywalls constantly and moved buyers to annual plans. He works alone with AI coding tools, so in his own 2026 account about US$3 million of about US$7 million a year stays as profit.
Read the storyThe first apps that combined OpenAI's Whisper and ChatGPT for voice notes appeared in 2023, and the founder found them "not implemented well enough". His team built a simpler one, collected early users and feature requests through lifetime deals on AppSumo in 2024, and in 2025 grew with advertising and paywall tests measured in Adapty's subscription data.
Read the storyIt entered a crowded category in March 2025 with paid advertising instead of a personal audience, and it treated the economics of each ad channel as the product to optimize. Cheaper attribution let it test low-cost traffic, and weekly advances on App Store payouts let it put each week's earnings back into ads within days instead of 45. Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, published the figures under its own name.
Read the storyIts result is a before-and-after picture of the user's own face, which a short video shows in seconds. The founder chose TikTok as the channel before he built the app, then tripled revenue from almost the same installs by moving and testing the paywall with Adapty.
Read the storyOne founder released it in August 2025, after Cal AI, released in April 2024, had shown that photo calorie counting sells. It has a hard paywall, a short trial and cheap yearly plans. It appears to have started in France: the French App Store shows 598 ratings against 138 in the US store. The owner lists TikTok as the only marketing channel.
Read the storyIt moved the structure of the founder's first app, Wrestle AI, to boxing, a sport that people can train alone: an AI breakdown of a training video, a calorie tracker and a weight-cut mode, all behind a subscription at the same prices. Users came from Meta ads and influencers, according to the founder's TrustMRR profile, with a self-reported marketing spend of US$10,000 a month.
Read the storyA carousel needs both writing and design. Draft AI asks for a minute of speech instead and returns finished slides, plus scripts, threads and hooks from the same recording. It charges before the first result, so everyone who uses it has subscribed or started the trial of a paid plan.
Read the storyThe tutor is an AI model, so the company pays for computing and has no teacher to pay by the hour. That allows a yearly price of US$47.99 to US$79.99. Customers came from a very large number of short videos on TikTok and Instagram: first slideshows that the founder's own tool generated and that two people posted from about 12 accounts, then videos by paid creators. Yearly plans are paid in full on the first day, so the cash arrived early. Half of all revenue came in September 2026, and daily sales have fallen since.
Read the storyIt built a product that already sold well in English for Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe: Ukrainian language, local dishes and lower local prices. The model that reads the photo is rented and the billing is a ready-made service. The only growth channel the founder names is paid advertising on Meta.
Read the storyPeople who plan a haircut or a new colour cannot see the result before the salon has done it. The app shows it on the user's own photo in seconds, using Google's Gemini model to analyse the hair and fal.ai to generate the image, as its privacy policy states. Revenue was close to zero until March 2026; in April 2026 the seller shipped a redesigned onboarding, a new paywall, a coin system and translations, and from then revenue rose every month, to US$17,882 in October 2026 up to 26 October, as TrustMRR reads it from the billing account.
Read the storyIt turns a label that most shoppers cannot read into one personal number, for diets that a general calorie app does not cover: low FODMAP, seed-oil-free, gluten-free, vegan. The store page says that analysis needs a subscription, so every active user pays. Verified revenue reached US$23,122 in its best month, February 2026, and US$178,939 in total, read from the app's billing account.
Read the storyIt sells a weekly subscription for a task students repeat before every test, and it charges from the first screen: the App Store reviews complain that the app cannot be used without paying. One small studio ships the same shell, the same legal pages and the same billing stack across six apps, so each new app costs little. The revenue, read from the app's RevenueCat account, reached US$23,480 in its best month and US$174,534 in total within twelve months of launch.
Read the storyPersonal colour analysis is a paid service that people book with a human consultant; the app does a version of it from one selfie in about 30 seconds, for the price of an app subscription. The seller's TrustMRR profile says that the growth came from Meta advertising in Turkey alone, and more than nine in ten of the app's App Store ratings are from the Turkish store. The RevenueCat account that TrustMRR reads shows US$172,972 in the twelve months to 25 October 2026, but also a fall of more than half in recurring revenue in the last month.
Read the storyTwo college track athletes already had about 150,000 Instagram followers who asked them every day for a training plan. They built that plan into an app without writing code, promoted it inside their own race videos, and priced it for teenagers.
Read the storyThe demand existed before the app: photos that look as if a compact digital camera from the 2000s took them have been a trend on TikTok since at least 2022. Boothie sells that look without the camera, for a small weekly price, to the people who already post such photos. The founder says every user came from TikTok picture posts made by about a dozen accounts in three countries, with no paid advertising. One person could build it because the image model is rented from Google and paid for by the picture.
Read the storyMany people own enough clothes and still do not know what to wear, and a screenshot of a look they like does not tell them how it would look on them or what in their closet goes with it. Aesty answers both questions with image models from OpenAI and Google, and sells the answer by the week, the month or the year. TrustMRR, reading the company's RevenueCat account, showed US$67,971 of revenue in total and US$10,064 of monthly recurring revenue from 688 subscriptions at the last sync on 22 September 2026.
Read the storyIt sold one effect that people already wanted on social media, a real-camera look without the "AI face", and it reached buyers through TikTok. The founder's profile says the app had "over 60M views on TikTok" with zero paid ads, and his sale listing says the growth runs on a templated TikTok slideshow format that "scales by adding accounts". Revenue rose for five months and then fell by about two thirds in September 2026.
Read the storyIt needs no connection to any chat app: a screenshot works for all of them, and a model that reads images does the rest. The seller says that most users are in Latin America, and the App Store ratings come mainly from Spain and Mexico, a Spanish-speaking market with fewer rival apps. The seller lists influencers as the marketing channel, and the web app has a creator programme with referral codes.
Read the storyThe app costs almost nothing to run: the owner reports a profit margin of 99%, and the App Store page shows no new version since July 2025. A small, steady flow of downloads, about 2,500 in 28 days in October 2026, keeps about 150 paid subscriptions alive. The owner is an experienced app marketer who already sells more than a dozen other apps from the same developer account.
Read the storyIt needs nothing but a phone: the camera replaces the sensors, the bag and the coach that earlier fitness products had to supply. The game layer of XP, levels and 1v1 matches gives users a reason to come back. The seller lists TikTok, TikTok Ads and Instagram as its marketing channels.
Read the storyA redesign picture of one's own room used to need an interior designer or hours of 3D software. Image-editing models offered as hosted services now make one in seconds, so a single developer could wrap such a model in a simple app and sell it as a subscription. The RevenueCat account that TrustMRR reads shows US$63,524 in the twelve months to 25 October 2026, with a best month in April 2026 and a steady fall since.
Read the storyIt does one job that golfers otherwise do by hand: drawing the ball's flight on a video. The ball detection runs on the phone, so each video costs the company nothing to process. The founder released 25 versions from February to October 2026, and the finished video is made to be posted on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
Read the storyIt entered a crowded category, habit trackers, with a free tracker and a paid AI coach on top. The founder shipped 83 versions in 21 months, so the product changed every week or two. Many buyers pay for a year at once, and whatsthe.app read that the money in the last 28 days was almost twice the monthly recurring revenue.
Read the storyIt sells a strong need, understanding speech one cannot follow, at a high price: US$34.99 a month or US$199 a year. The hard parts, recognising speech and translating it, are rented from AI providers, so the seller works on the app around them. The seller names word of mouth, App Store optimization and Apple Ads as the channels, and has changed the store name and texts several times.
Read the storyIt launched in January 2023 with a name that people were already typing into search engines, and the company wrote that more than 35,000 people used it in its first two weeks. One person then kept adding features, languages and more than 2,000 recipe articles for search, and moved the app from recipe ideas toward calorie tracking, which people pay for every month.
Read the storySpeaking is the part of a language that learners practice least, because a human partner is expensive or not available. An AI tutor that listens and answers by voice is available at any hour for a fixed subscription. The founder chose search as the way to find learners: the website has about 1,600 pages in ten languages, and TrustMRR, reading the site's Google Search Console account, counted 460,920 Google search impressions in 30 days.
Read the storyA tattoo is permanent, so people want to see it before they sit in the chair, and the app sells exactly that preview. The design is made by image models from fal.ai and OpenAI, so the company did not have to train a model. The seller says all traffic is unpaid and comes from two TikTok accounts that come with the sale.
Read the storyThe video models themselves are rented from fal.ai, a service that runs other companies' AI models behind one programming interface, so the app is mostly a simple screen, a style list and a payment wall around those models. One codebase in React Native serves both phone platforms, and the developer shipped 22 versions on iOS between January and August 2026. The developer runs a portfolio of more than a dozen AI apps, so the store accounts and the methods are shared.
Read the storyThe founders said that most new users came from search: their blog brought over 40% of new users and AI answers (ChatGPT and Google's AI) another 28%. Short slideshows on four TikTok accounts brought views but few sign-ups, about one per 10,000 views. The product removes the main limit of earlier learning apps, a fixed catalog of courses, because the model writes a new course for each request.
Read the storyIt turns chart reading, which a beginner would otherwise have to learn, into one upload and one answer, and it works on any market because it reads a picture and needs no market data feed. The App Store sells it worldwide: whatsthe.app counts 92 ratings from 13 countries, and the most come from India. MRR was about US$5,700 at the start of September 2026, calculated from the 28-day growth figure, and then fell by about half.
Read the storyCovering an old tattoo is a permanent and expensive decision, and the person wants to see a direction before talking to an artist. The app sells that preview for credits, and the images come from fal.ai, a hosted image-model service, so the founder did not train a model. Revenue rose from US$255 in June 2026 to about US$2,400 in each of August and September, then fell in October.
Read the storyLearners who study alone rarely get to speak, and a conversation partner who never gets tired and can play any role fills that gap. The founder packaged the AI conversation as role-play scenarios, which tell a beginner what to say and give each session a goal, and offered it in 25 languages from one app. Most ratings come from France, then the United States, Mexico and Brazil.
Read the storyChoosing a lure is the question that every new angler has at the water, and a phone camera plus weather data can answer it in seconds. One developer built a narrow app around that single question, put the answer behind a subscription, and promoted it with short videos on TikTok. Sales are highest in the summer fishing months.
Read the storyYoung players want to improve but rarely have a coach who plans their training or watches their games. The app sells that as a subscription for a few dollars a week and dresses it as a game with XP and ranks. TrustMRR, which read the app's revenue through a RevenueCat API key, shows US$13,188 of revenue from June to 16 September 2026 and US$2,246 of monthly recurring revenue from 375 subscriptions at that date, about US$6 a subscription.
Read the storyMost language apps teach through English, which excludes many people in India. Indilingo makes the learner's own language the language of the whole app, and a large language model makes that possible for hundreds of language pairs without writing a separate course for each pair. Low Indian prices and payment by UPI then turned a free app into about 1,200 small subscriptions.
Read the storyMany recipes now live in short videos, where the ingredients are spoken or shown and never written down. A model that can watch a video and write out a structured recipe turned an old app category, the recipe keeper, into something that works for these videos. One developer built it on rented models and sells it through the app stores as a subscription.
Read the storyEditing a spoken video is mostly repetitive work: finding the pauses, cutting retakes and typing captions. BlitzCut does these steps automatically on the phone where the video was recorded. One developer ships often: the App Store shows 25 versions from 28 March to 6 October 2026, and the developer answers user reviews personally.
Read the storyIt answers one narrow question that hikers, gardeners and people who heat their homes with firewood actually ask, and it answers it with a rented AI model instead of a model the company had to train. The same small studio sells the same pattern for snakes, mushrooms, birds, rocks, stamps and trading cards, so the work on one app helps the others.
Read the storyIt sold speed to people who gave up on manual food logging, it paid 250 influencers fixed monthly fees to reach them, and it had a 30-dollar-a-year price. The rented model made the hard part cost almost nothing to build.
Read the storyA haircut, a dye job or a dress bought online is hard to undo, and the app sells a preview of the result for the price of a weekly subscription. According to the Flippa listing, the app made US$73,000 in net revenue in its first year mostly from people who found it by searching the App Store, with low advertising, and 80% of its iOS revenue in May 2026 came from renewals. The company also runs a website of hairstyle and colour guides in 58 languages that sends visitors to the stores.
Read the storyIt launched in June 2023, when open-source language models had become good enough for a small company to build a companion, and when users of older companion apps were looking for a new one. The user writes the character, so a character from another app can be moved in. The company sells a subscription, prices its add-ons at the cost of the extra computing, and published an update about every eight days in 2026.
Read the storyTwo former Loom staff built a premium-priced app for something students do several times a week, going to class, and sold it through short videos by a small group of contracted creators instead of paid ads. It charged from the first day, and revenue paid for growth with about 50% EBITDA margins until Quizlet bought it.
Read the storySpeaking is the part of language learning that most apps practice least, and the founders built the practice partner that they had been for each other. A short video format, in which the AI points out a creator's pronunciation errors, spread on TikTok through about 100 creators that the company manages, with no paid ads by the co-founder's account, and a simple subscription turned a small part of the free users into payers.
Read the storyThe company says most language apps are games for beginners. Fluently aims at people who studied a language for years and still freeze when they must speak, and it prices the tutor far below a human one. The founder said that a large part of the growth in 2025 came from short videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Read the storyYoung men were already posting photos online and asking strangers to rate their looks. Umax turned that habit into a private score from an AI model. One founder built it at almost no cost on a rented vision model, and creators in one small niche spread it, because a score makes a before-and-after video easy to show. Revenue was highest within months of the launch and has fallen since.
Read the storyFilling in the same facts on every employer's application form, and rewriting a resume for every job, is the slowest part of a job search for students and new graduates. The founder had already built a growth system for her first app: hundreds of paid short-video creators trained with her own course. She moved the same system to a job app, aimed at college students and recent graduates, who she says have more buying power than her beauty app's users.
Read the storyThe founder had wrestled in school and knew that wrestlers rarely have an expert to review their film, and in 2025 the App Store had no app like it. The video breakdown can be shown in under 10 seconds, so creators could sell the app in posts that look like training videos, not ads. A no-code builder kept the total spending at about US$1,100.
Read the storyIt solves one narrow problem for a very large app: WhatsApp users who chat with people in another language and do not want to copy every message into a translator. The app has been on Google Play since June 2021 and counts more than 700,000 installs. The Flippa listing says all growth was organic, that the translation API costs about US$20 a month, and that the app needs about two hours of work a week.
Read the storyResellers decide in the shop whether an item is worth buying, and later write a sales listing for each item they bought. The app does both steps from one photo. The Flippa listing states that it was paid for by weekly and annual subscriptions, that most downloads came from App Store search and Apple Search Ads, and that the API and software cost about US$35 a month.
Read the storyThe founder says that in 2021 his app stopped growing, so he studied the sign-up and payment screens of bigger apps for six months and rebuilt the product from scratch three times. The new version writes the plan for the user. He says that it let his Facebook and TikTok ads pay for themselves on the day they ran, so he could buy users without outside money.
Read the storyThe podcast that reported the money says the founder sold manual profile reviews for US$15 on Instagram before he wrote any code, so the demand and the price were tested before the app existed. He then posted batches of TikTok slideshows, added paid ads with one influencer's videos, defaulted the paywall to a yearly plan and sold photo packs to the users who spend most.
Read the storyThe founder, a marketer who is not a programmer, said in an August 2026 interview that he built the first working version in two weeks with the AI code editor Cursor, launched in June 2025, and reached about US$20,000 a month in four months with paid ads, which cost less in Israel than in the United States. He then gave two well-known Israeli fitness influencers half of the revenue from Israel instead of paying them per post, and said that this took the app to over US$81,000 in April 2026.
Read the storySteve Hoyek said he had lost 45 kilos by counting calories in many apps and found them too complex, so the two co-founders built the simplest one they could. The founder said on Starter Story that iPhone ads cost about four times as much per view as Android ads, while iPhone users convert only about 20% better. With no outside money, they put their ads on Android, mostly Google's app campaigns, and the founder said about 80% of users and revenue came from Android.
Read the storyTwo founders with consumer-app experience built a prototype in under a week, launched a free web app in July 2023, kept it a web app for twelve months, and added native phone apps in August 2024 once the product had its users. It positions itself as a companion between therapy sessions, not as therapy, and gets recommended by therapists and coaches. The company said in June 2025 that 7,500 paying customers came from that positioning and a long-term memory system that chat models did not offer.
Read the storyIt shipped a working summarizer two months after ChatGPT appeared, launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News in the same month, and then turned every summary into a public web page that ranks in Google. Starter Story, which estimates revenue from public data, put it at about US$45,000 a month in May 2024 with three people.
Read the storyThe founder says the app sat at about US$300 a month for a year and a half, until a content creator in Colombia found the founder's X link inside the app and proposed a partnership. According to the founder, three story-driven videos a month in Spanish, paid with a share of the profits and a fixed retainer, took the app to more than US$35,000 a month in about a year.
Read the storyThe founder built it for a problem he had himself as a new guitarist, so he knew the problem without market research. He shipped a simple web version first and charged from the start. Then he posted short videos of the product several times a day, with his own face, and one of the first videos spread widely. The iPhone app came only after the web version had paying users.
Read the storyThe two founders had run an email marketing agency in college, so they planned how to reach customers before the product was good. They built the app without coding experience, with Claude and Cursor, released it with crashes, and fixed it in public. Growth came from free posts on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, then from a small group of creators who post about the app every day, then from paid ads on Meta. Co-founder Giancarlo Sarti told Starter Story in March 2026 that the app made US$12,900 in February 2026.
Read the storyThe founder said in September 2024 that the app does not sell AI; it sells a feeling, and the animation that plays when the model finishes its work is the moment people decide to pay. It charged from the first day, spent nothing on advertising, gave a free month to users who posted about it on Xiaohongshu, and reached the top three of Apple's Food and Drink chart in China within weeks.
Read the storyMany women on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social app, already lit their selfies by opening a solid-colour picture on a second phone, which took several steps: search, open the post, zoom, raise the brightness. The founder said in December 2024 that his partner's remark showed him this need and that he decided to build the app in under five minutes. He said he built it in about an hour with Cursor, posted it on Xiaohongshu, and answered the comments as a person; when copies appeared, he released the paid version at CNY 1 and, as he told Qbitai, turned the act of charging into a marketing event.
Read the storyIt came out on 11 January 2023, when ChatGPT "has been all over the headlines recently", as MusicRadar wrote that day, and music writers were curious about any new use of OpenAI's models, and articles in MusicRadar, Fast Company and other outlets followed. The founder said in April 2023 that most users came from his posts on Twitter and that the press coverage kept bringing new people. He also said it took two weeks after the January launch to reach US$2,000 in revenue.
Read the storyThe next verified one-person AI business goes here. Same structure, same evidence grades.
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