How Much Money Do Apps Make? Modeled Revenue by Chart Position (2026)

The short answer

There is no typical app income. Revenue is extremely concentrated: the apps at the top of the grossing charts are modeled to gross tens of millions of dollars a month from in-app purchases and subscriptions, and the curve drops steeply within the first hundred positions. This analysis describes charted apps only; it says nothing about the millions of listings that were not on these US charts. The useful question is not “how much does an app make?” but “how much do apps like mine, in this position, appear to make?”

This page answers that second question with original data. We took the US top-grossing charts as they stood on October 6, 2026, joined every charted app to its AppGazers revenue estimate for August 2026, and summarized the estimates by chart position. Every figure is a modeled estimate with an 80% band, not a reported number.

Modeled spend by US top-grossing chart position

Among apps selected from the October 6 US App Store chart, the top ten had a median worldwide modeled gross in-app spend of about $43.0M for August 2026. By positions 41–50 the median fell to about $13.8M, and by positions 91–100 to about $5.8M. The slope is steep at the top and flattens lower down: the gap between No. 1–10 and No. 41–50 is roughly 3x, and between No. 41–50 and No. 91–100 a further 2.4x.

Google Play’s US top-grossing chart is 200 places deep. Its top ten had a median of about $21.1M, positions 91–100 about $1.6M, and positions 171–200 about $428K. In this snapshot, Play estimates at a given position were generally lower than App Store estimates at the same position. Treat that as a pattern in one sample, not a rule.

• App Store US No. 91–100 (August 2026, modeled): median $5.8M; median band $2.7M–$14.6M.
• Google Play US No. 91–100: median $1.6M; median band $674K–$3.9M.
• Google Play US No. 171–200: median $428K; median band $199K–$884K.

A category view: Health & Fitness on the App Store

Overall charts are dominated by games, streaming, dating and AI assistants, so they overstate what a focused utility needs. Category charts are a better benchmark for most indie developers. In the US App Store Health & Fitness top-grossing chart, the top ten had a median of about $3.8M in modeled monthly gross spend, positions 41–50 about $524K, and positions 91–100 about $151K (eight of those ten apps had an estimate).

Put differently: in this snapshot, apps selected from near the bottom of the US top-100 Health & Fitness chart on October 6 had worldwide August modeled spend in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is a descriptive association between two different periods and scopes, not a threshold for entering the chart, and it is far from the eight-figure numbers that headline articles quote.

Named examples with uncertainty bands

Medians hide the spread, so here are individual apps from the same snapshot. Each figure is AppGazers’ modeled worldwide gross in-app spend for the 30 days ending August 31, 2026, with the P10–P90 band in brackets. Chart positions are from October 6, 2026.

• ChatGPT (App Store, US top grossing No. 1): $94.1M [$43.8M–$238.6M].
• Duolingo (App Store, No. 25 overall): $53.6M [$24.9M–$135.9M].
• Google One (Google Play, US top grossing No. 1): $95.8M [$39.2M–$226.6M].
• MyFitnessPal (App Store, Health & Fitness No. 1): $18.7M [$8.7M–$47.5M].
• MacroFactor (App Store, Health & Fitness No. 10): $1.47M [$685K–$3.73M].
• Cal AI (App Store, Health & Fitness No. 12): $1.72M [$802K–$4.37M].
• Suno (App Store, No. 100 overall): $5.6M [$2.6M–$14.2M].
• Finch: Self-Care Pet (Google Play, US top grossing No. 90): $559K [$259K–$1.15M].

How wide the uncertainty really is

The 80% bands are wide on purpose. For a large app such as ChatGPT on iOS, the P90 is about 5.5 times the P10. For smaller apps the ratio is often wider: Hatch Sleep, at No. 11 in Health & Fitness, is modeled at $973K with a band of $359K–$2.64M, a spread of more than 7x. A responsible reading is “the model reports a range from the high hundreds of thousands to the low millions for that month,” not “this app made $973K.” The band is the model’s stated uncertainty, not a guarantee that the actual figure falls inside it.

Individual estimates can also be plainly off. In this snapshot one game in the top fifteen of the overall App Store chart is modeled below $2M a month, and one app in positions 51–75 is modeled at about $40K. Those observations warrant investigation, although the estimates cover worldwide August spend and the chart is an October US ranking, so a rank alone does not prove the model wrong. The model is also known to compress the very top of the distribution, so the largest apps are more likely to be underestimated than overestimated. That is why this page reports medians by position band rather than ranking apps by their point estimates, and why you should cross-check any single number against chart history, pricing, and reviews before relying on it.

What these numbers include and exclude

AppGazers revenue estimates model gross in-app spend: what users paid through the store for purchases and subscriptions, before Apple or Google take their commission. They exclude advertising revenue, web or direct-billing sales, enterprise contracts, and any measure of profit. An ad-funded app can make far more than its in-app estimate shows, and a subscription app that bills on the web can make more than the store sees.

The estimates are worldwide and app-level. A US chart position is used here only to select apps; the revenue figure is not a US-only number, and AppGazers does not produce country-level revenue. Apple and Google also take a commission from gross spend (their published rates depend on program and product type), so a developer’s proceeds are materially lower than the gross figure.

Method: how this analysis was built

On October 6, 2026 we pulled three chart snapshots through the AppGazers MCP server’s list_store_rankings tool: US App Store top grossing (100 positions), US Google Play top grossing (positions 1–30, 81–110 and 171–200 of 200), and US App Store Health & Fitness top grossing (100 positions). Each charted app carries the estimate fields estRevenue30d, estRevenueP10 and estRevenueP90 from the model run of September 4, 2026, covering the 30 days ending August 31, 2026.

For each position band we report the median point estimate and the median P10 and median P90 across apps in the band. Medians of the bounds are a readable summary of typical uncertainty, not a statistically combined interval. Apps without an estimate were excluded and counted. We did not adjust, remove or hand-pick outliers.

We wanted to publish a catalog-wide distribution as well, for example the share of all listed apps above $10K a month. The MCP search interface returned exact counts only for small filtered result sets on the day of analysis, so we could not produce a defensible catalog-wide percentage and have not published one. As context, AppGazers’ catalog held 5,425,312 App Store and Google Play listings on October 6, 2026, of which 2,320,316 had store metrics.

How to use this for your own app idea

Use the category chart, not the overall chart. Find the category your app would compete in, look at the modeled bands for apps around positions 10, 50 and 100, and read their listings, pricing and reviews. That describes what charted apps in the category were modeled to gross; it is not a forecast of what your app will earn.

Then compare like with like: apps of similar age, price model and audience. A two-year-old subscription utility and a ten-year-old category leader are not the same benchmark. Write down the period and band for every number you use, and treat the result as a prioritization signal for further research, not a revenue forecast.

• Pick one store, one category and one chart date.
• Record the estimate period (here, the 30 days ending August 31, 2026) and the band, not just the point.
• Check rank history to see whether a position is stable or a spike.
• Validate demand with your own tests before committing budget.

Official sources reviewed

• AppGazers MCP server documentation — The tools used for this analysis (list_store_rankings, search_apps, get_catalog_stats); data retrieved October 6, 2026.
• AppGazers product facts — Definition of modeled gross in-app spend and its exclusions.
• Apple: App Store Small Business Program — Apple’s published commission program for eligible developers.
• Google Play: service fees — Google’s published service-fee structure for in-app sales.