May 2021 Updates

Posted on 2 June, 2021

Recap: May 2021

Looking purely at dollars, May appears to continue the downward trend of sales for Thought Detox. However, because the app was on sale all month, downloads are actually up. And, again, this is a very small number of downloads, big percentage changes might still be in the margin of error for number of units.

Here’s what the download numbers looked like for April:

Per: 5 downloads (-17% ▽)
Thought Detox: 7 downloads (+40% △)

Revenues and proceeds on May sales are estimates based on the information I get from Apple, in US Dollars.

Revenues, May 2021: USD$15.65 (what customers paid Apple)
Proceeds, May 2021: USD$12.27 (what Apple pays me)
Expenses, May 2021: CAD$12.00 (approximately USD$10)

Depending on the USD-CAD exchange rate, that means May was, again, profitable. My baseline monthly expenses break down into two line items: fees on the business bank account (CAD$7), and a GitHub “teams” subscription for one user (CAD$5). It’s tight, though, and whatever profit I have for the month is taken up by things like setting aside money for domain renewals and the like.

I try to ship an update to Thought Detox every month; in May, I shipped a couple more accessibility improvements.

Looking Ahead

It’s clear to anyone that’s been reading these updates over the past few months that the numbers being generated by the Dropped Bits app business aren’t huge. So far, though —because I’m able to keep my business costs very, very low— it’s been worth the effort.

That effort, admittedly, has been a little low since launching Thought Detox in February. I’m trying to ship one update a month for the app, but I also need to work on other projects to make sure I can keep a roof over our heads and food on our table, so time available for working on my own apps is, naturally, limited.

I wrote a thing on my personal blog about how it can feel when we focus too much on the numbers. That thing —whatever it is— can fall out of alignment with our original intent, and you end up making decisions for the numbers rather than for you.

I like making apps, and I’ve enjoyed building Thought Detox! I purposely made choices that limit its potential revenue: there are no ads in the app, it never interrupts you to ask for a review, and it doesn’t use confusing free-trial business models. All of those things could improve sales, but it would also be in direct opposition to the intent of the app: to build a private and calm place for you to work through your thoughts.

All this to say that on the whole, I’m happy building this. I’m working towards the iPad version, slowly. The first step is to build an alternate way of tracking your time spent writing, since iPads don’t have access to the Health app’s database.

More to come!