I spent $200 on App Store Ads
So you don't have to!
- 195 views of my app page
- 114 downloads
- 4 conversions (~$100)
You get $100 credit for free: so I roughly broke even.
TLDR:
- Popular keywords + niche location = profit.
- US campaign (not pictured) performed awfully.
- US will have most competition.
- So you'll need to pay more for to win the bid.
- Your "max bid" may need to be ~$2/3+ to get it to spend.
- Don't put a super high max bid (I put £4 and burnt $75)
- Test out $1 a day, if you see no spend, up to $2, etc
- You're in competition with other apps.
- If their max bid is higher, they get the spot.
- The support team is much better than other platforms.
"apps are saturated in 2026 😔🥀"
if you ever think apps are saturated, think about it this way:
most b2c verticals have poor retention which is why they push yearly pricing in their paywall
one app making $1M/mo consistently with high churn basically means they're gaining ~$400-500k worth of NEW customers every single month
if the market was truly saturated, acquiring customers at this scale wold be impossible
I see new calorie trackers popping up every single day and still finding an audience because the TAM is huge
the only saturation I can foresee would be on specific distribution channels, like:
- CPMs getting too high on certain ad networks
- all influencers starting to ask crazy prices
- organic content pool getting crowded which makes simpler formats hard to go viral
but honestly I don't thnk we're quite there yet
sure you'll hear people complaining about influencers asking $25k for 40k avg views
but for each creator like this there's another one you'll sign at <$1 CPM if you approach it the right way
at the end of the day it all comes down to skills:
- whoever makes the highest-converting ad creatives will afford higher CPMs
- whoever negotiates and sources the best influencer deals will find the highest ROI
- whoever knows how to make viral content at scale will own organic channels
- ...and whoever finds unconventional distribution strategies will make an arbitrage
it's tempting to blame the game but the reality is you're probably not trying hard enough
though if you're just making another plant identifier app and waiting for ASO to bring you the bag... yes, it's saturated