Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

Hi friends,

A year ago, I released Wins 1.0 to the world, It's a Window manager App for macOS and I got my first batch users back then, which gave me a huge encouragement and I'm very grateful here.

Today, one year later, I want to be open and transparent about the current development status and revenue of Wins to the lovely community, to you

# About Revenue In total, I have sold 1,612 licenses, with 701 through the Wins official website and 911 through other channels.

Yes, currently, Wins has fewer than 2,000 users

From all these sales, my total income is $9,485 over the course of one year and three months, it's not too much.

However, Wins has a high number of active users. In the past seven days, there have been over 1,000 users, and in the last 28 days, approximately 2,000 people have used Wins.

I feel incredibly honored that Wins has been able to help you, and I am sincerely grateful for your support in my independent development journey.

# About Development Status During the year, I received a lot of feedback and suggestions, coupled with my understanding of Apple's product philosophy, I want to make something wonderful to bring to the macOS X, so I've added some features that I think are cool in the past year，such as :

1. Dock Window Preview. Now you can directly preview all windows of an app you opened

2. Shake window to hide other windows. Drag a window, give it a shake, and all other windows will be hidden

3. Hide other windows with shortcut key You can also achieve it using keyboard shortcuts

4. Move to another display. Quickly move the window to another monitor

5. Hide All Windows. One shortcut to hide all windows, and the world becomes clean

# In the end I'm not a famous developer, I don't have much of audiences, I don't know how to market or promote, I just an Apple fan who loves the macOS.

it wasn't an easy year for Wins, But luckily it's alive. I'm alive haha

I currently have a job, but initially, I thought Wins could sustain itself through independent development. However, I later realized that the timing might not be right yet. But I believe that as long as I continue to polish Wins and make it better, it will be able to independently support me in continuously developing new features.

Finally, I'd like to share my app here with those who might need it and let you know that it has a 50% discount during Black Friday

If you like it and want to support independent development(thanks a lot), or if you haven't tried Wins yet, I hope you give it a try.

https://wins.cool

ps. I hope my sharing doesn't disrupt this community.

Cool, I might give it a try considering that Moom is having issues with Sonoma on my MBP m3 :/

I think your pricing is great but I would personally do a different tier system. Smaller yearly cost for yearly subscriptions for future updates (6,99 maybe) plus lifetime for a higher price.

I think lifetime value at that price is unsustainable for you if you have to give support and updates with no extra income coming from it. If you consider lifetime as a 5x yearly you’re giving yourself a good time window to make the product grow sustainably.

As a solo developer who has built B2C software in the past, 1600 sales in your first year is outstanding.

But I have to say your pricing is terrible - from all perspectives.

For you, unless you sell in the hundreds of thousands (which I've never heard of for B2C software) it's unlikely to ever be a day job replacement.

For the consumer, before they even decide to try your software you're telling them it has the lifetime value of a cup of coffee and a donut.

Price is one of the things consumers look at to determine something's value. You've priced your product so cheaply and many will view your product in the same way.

It's not much harder to sell a $99 product as it is to sell a $9 product to consumers. And the users you get at the higher price point will be better users.

But that 1600 user sales figure - for a one man shop in year one - is fantastic.

What would your yearly profits have been if your price was $49 or $79 or more?

I would never buy this app for more than $9 - there are free alternatives such as Rectangle. $9 is low enough I'd consider it if it has some extra features or polish, but definitely not $49 or $79.

Software subscriptions are a plague.