The gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a product earning money" is not talent or luck. It's a stack of upfront costs and a long stretch of unpaid work that most people, reasonably, never sign up for. Here's what that stack looks like, and why it's still worth crossing.
Take the most popular idea format there is, a mobile app, and add up what it costs one person to get it into the App Store legitimately.
| Apple Developer Program Required to publish anything to the App Store |
$99 / year |
| Apple hardware Building and submitting an iOS app requires a Mac |
$600 to $2,000+ |
| Business formation & upkeep Company filing fees, registered agent, annual reports; varies by state |
$50 to $500+, often recurring |
| Domain, hosting, services Backend, database, email, analytics; small monthly bills that never stop |
$10 to $100+ / month |
| Marketing Millions of apps compete for the same eyeballs; visibility is bought with ad spend, content, or months of unpaid promotion work |
Usually the largest cost of all |
And that's the money side only. The bigger cost is time: months of development, store review cycles, bug fixes, and launch work, all unpaid until the product earns. Most solo projects don't fail on quality. They fail because the builder runs out of money or patience before the finish line.
The upside is just as real as the barrier. Small, focused software products with modest pricing routinely become durable income streams once they're actually live and actively marketed.
A meaningful share of small software products that actually reach the market settle into this range of recurring revenue. Not life-changing alone, but real, repeatable income from a single narrow idea.
Well-executed niche products run by tiny teams regularly reach five figures of monthly revenue, and finished products with real revenue can also be sold outright, often for multiples of their yearly earnings.
The products that reach those numbers are rarely the most original ideas. They're ordinary ideas that someone funded, shipped, and marketed all the way through, while the rest stayed prototypes.
The honest part: most software products, however well built, earn little or nothing, and none of the figures above are a promise about any specific idea. They describe what becomes possible once a product is actually finished and marketed, which is exactly the stage most ideas never reach. Our review exists to pick the ideas we believe are worth funding through that stage.
If we select it, every line item above is on us.