How much does it cost to get into the TOP Apple App Store?

    Of course, first of all, you need to say a couple of captain parting words from the category of “make an awesome application, the best of its kind and blah blah blah.” Everyone is striving for this, but it turns out that Systrom has units.

    Therefore, if we discard the “honest” ways of getting into the TOP (which happen to those very units), then the question is not how to get there, but how much it will cost. Indeed, if you did not inadvertently invent anything that in itself is capable of blowing up the market, breaking through about 800 thousand applications similar to yours, the task is not an easy one.


    Naturally, in such a situation there are many who want to help solve the problems of achieving the desired “visibility”, obtaining “exposure” and further according to the scenario: everyone is happy and you bathe in organic installations that hit you with an inexhaustible stream of users rushing to spend money in your application. And such services, indirectly and directly hinting at these benefits, are not a few (a little more and this market will begin to burst at the seams), but not everyone can and should be trusted with their applications. You can “poke around” so that your application is completely ejected from the App Store. And there have been such cases.

    Recently AppGratis has been promoting PR quite well, “success story” (Wake N Shake, Word of The Rings) their promotion is mentioned in quite respected resources. But you can be in the TOP in various ways, and the purchased traffic does not always mean high-quality traffic and, often, with such pushes in the TOP, the application is pumped with incentivized installs. Therefore, we decided to find out in more detail what this company is, how it pushes applications and how much it costs.



    In short, AppGratis is an application that features one application every day (both paid with discounts and free) from the App Store. At the moment, the application has more than 10 million users, of which 3 million use it every day. “A unique editorial approach” is considered to be their distinguishing feature from other similar applications (Free App Of The Day, AppHero, etc.), in other words, they do not feature everyone in a row, but only applications with excellent ratings and user reviews, taking into account local specifics , i.e. Depending on the country, the content of the application varies. Thus, a loyal user base is created for the application, by which they are hiding promising non-incentivized installations to developers.

    According to an interview given by the founder of Simon Dawlat, AppGratis makes more than $ 1 million a month and does it in two ways.
    The first and main of them is a partnership with major brands on CPI. For example, featured fitness app Nike Plus with a two-month subscription to the service.
    Second wayfor smaller developers - get a share of their profits in exchange for a million or two more users. According to the company, they get their share at the end of the week, which just goes through the main wave of installs that came from AppGratis plus organic installs due to getting into the TOP. In some cases (when the earning potential on the target application is rather small), the developers pay $ 20,000 in advance for the featured itself (in other words, we install you, and then you yourself, how it goes).

    In matters of scale and coverage of various markets, the application is quite widely represented. Countries such as the USA, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Mexico are offered for capture.

    In terms of the duration of the push itself, on the part of AppGratis it lasts exactly 24 hours, after which you should go organic as a result of achieving visibility in the charts. But here, as they say, it should, but it’s not obliged, most likely in a week the application will smoothly slide about where it came from without additional infusion of traffic. But the promised installs for getting into the TOP for these 24 hours they will provide you.

    Here is the approximate number of installations per day to get to Top Free (iPhone) in different countries and the budget needed for this action.


    Each installation in AppGratis will cost an average of $ 1.8 for Europe and $ 3 for the USA. Through simple arithmetic, it turns out that in order to get into the most coveted TOP free in the United States you have to fork out for about $ 195,000. The number is rather big, and for most indie developers it’s completely impossible.

    But the question is rather not in the size of the numbers, but in the appropriateness of these expenses from an economic point of view. This is the case if you have IAPs in your free application and you know your ARPU. This will approximately calculate both the campaign budget and the planned profit from it and find the break-even point, respectively, which makes it possible to determine the feasibility of such investments.

    Nor can it be said with certainty that AppGratis offers non-incentivized clean installs. It is reliably known that the company is interested in buying traffic from ad networks, which leads to certain thoughts about the quality of traffic, which they then convert for their own push companies.

    The summary is this: it’s not enough to get into the TOP, you need to linger in it, for which the application must continue to generate the necessary number of installations for this every day. But as practice shows, even fairly well-known applications resort to constant injections of traffic in order to maintain the application at the desired level of visibility. And in order for this to make sense in principle (even for a short period of time), the application must have good enough ARPU.

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