Budgee Sales Data for 2008
I know we're already well into 2009 at this point, but since I've been promising to post Budgee sales data for a while now, I'm going to go ahead and get this out there. This is the raw weekly sales data for Budgee for all of 2008.
| Date | Sales | Updates |
|---|---|---|
| 20081019 | 389 | 0 |
| 20081026 | 169 | 235 |
| 20081102 | 99 | 45 |
| 20081109 | 72 | 18 |
| 20081116 | 36 | 9 |
| 20081123 | 29 | 7 |
| 20081130 | 18 | 4 |
| 20081207 | 60 | 151 |
| 20081214 | 136 | 152 |
| 20081221 | 58 | 320 |
| 20081228 | 138 | 90 |
| Total | 1204 | 1031 |
For reference, Budgee was introduced in mid-October 2008 at price tier 2 (that's $1.99 US). It stayed at $1.99 except the last two weeks of December 2008 when the price was lowered to $0.99 for a holiday sale. During these few months, there were not a ton of updates - a few right at the beginning and then a couple scattered around after that. The dip the week of December 21st was caused by Budgee being removed from the app store for a couple of days prior to the holiday sale. (In short, I wanted the price to start at Christmas, but Apple was cutting off iTunes Connect access a few days ahead of that...so I had to change the release date to Christmas and then change the price...the result of that was that the app was removed until Christmas and I couldn't change it back.)
You can see that Budgee doesn't bring in enough revenue for one to live on - it averages ~$250/mo - but it is certainly a nice side job. Keep in mind, these sales were all made without any form of advertising. My goal for 2008 was just to break even with the cost of the iPhone SDK - so I've more than met that goal. Budgee is also one of the programs *I* really wanted on my iPhone for the longest time - so my intent was to make the app that I wanted and then if people enjoyed it and I made money with it, then all the better. For 2009, I'm trying some different tactics with Budgee - online marketing, more frequent updates, a major upgrade - so we'll see how all of that ends up changing things.
I have also included data on updates so you can see how the number of total users compares to the number of users running the latest updates. If you have any questions about this data, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer. I'd like to be pretty open about Budgee since I've learned a lot from the iPhone dev community sharing information like this, so I'd like to try to give back when I can.