Every indie developer forum repeats the same number: about $35 in ads to get one paying customer. The usual explanation is "you buy 35 clicks at a dollar each and one of them pays". The $35 number is roughly right. The 35 clicks explanation is wrong. If $35 is a median produced by four multipliers, the real question is how far down you can push it, and what that lets you charge.
The short version:
- The cost of one paying customer is not only an app problem. The same four numbers decide the cost of a customer for a SaaS, a web product or a physical good. Only the name of the middle step changes: install, signup or trial.
- $35 per paying customer is real, but it is a median. Benchmarks put one paying app customer at $20 to $80, and one ecommerce customer at $68 to $84.
- The cost of a paying customer is not a price you look up. It is four multipliers: CPM (the price of 1,000 ad views), click rate, signup rate and payer rate. This article calls those four your funnel, the chain from someone seeing the ad to someone paying. On the same platform in the same week, those four numbers produce anything from $11 to $833 per paying customer.
- Distrust the "CPA" (cost per acquisition) figure any ad platform quotes. Apple's quoted Apple Ads CPA of $2.51 to $3.76 is a cost per install, not per paying customer. Divide it by your payer rate (the share of installs who pay), or you understate your real cost by 10x.
- The lowest realistic cost of a paying customer is about $10 to $15 on paid social and $13 to $25 on Apple's search ads.
- The biggest lever on the cost of a customer is the ad itself, not the bid. The top 10% of advertisers pay 40% to 60% less per install.
- When only 2% to 5% of installs pay, as in a typical freemium app, the same median ad funnel costs $120 per paying customer, not $35.
- The median subscription app earns $21.37 per paying customer in year one. So paying $35 in ads to obtain each customer loses money on every one.
- So working out your cost per customer gives you not an ad budget but a minimum price for your product.
The $35 customer is a real median, not an invention
The $35 cost per paying customer is not folklore. Independently published 2025 and 2026 benchmark sets put a paying app customer in the same range.
| Where the number comes from | Cost of one customer | How reliable it is | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile apps, per paying user | $20 to $80 | Directly comparable | $35 sits almost exactly mid-band |
| Meta, measured cost per purchase | $41.94 to $48.18 | Observed transactions, not modelled | The strongest single data point here |
| Ecommerce average | $68 to $84 | Broad, up 60% in five years | Physical goods cost more to sell |
| Google Ads, per conversion | $48.96 search, $75.51 display | Loose: a conversion is often a lead | True cost per payer is higher still |
| B2B SaaS | $200 to $2,000 | Well documented | Proves $35 is not a constant: CAC tracks price |
So the $35 rumour matches the benchmark data. The "35 clicks at a dollar" explanation attached to it does not.
The 35 clicks at a dollar story is arithmetically backwards
- Nobody pays a dollar a click on Meta ads. Meta's 2025 average CPC was about $0.30. So $35 of Meta ads buys roughly 115 clicks, not 35.
- Getting clicks is not where the chain from ad to paying customer breaks down. Triple Whale, an analytics company used by over 40,000 online stores, found the median store advertising on Meta turned 1.53% of ad clicks into a sale from August 2025 to July 2026. RevenueCat, a company that runs subscription billing for apps, found the median app turns only 4.0% to 9.1% of downloads into a free trial within 30 days, depending on the app category.
- So the ad auction is rarely what makes a customer expensive, and time spent adjusting bids is mostly wasted.
The $35 cost per customer is real. The story explaining it points you at the one stage of the funnel where you have the least control and the least to gain.
Cost per customer is four multipliers, not a price you look up
With ads, you buy impressions, meaning times your ad is shown. A fraction of the people who see the ad click, a fraction of those sign up, and a fraction of those pay.
| Stage | What it measures | Median value | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. CPM | Price of 1,000 impressions | $13.48 | The auction, barely you |
| 2. Click-through rate | Impressions that become clicks | 1.5% | Your creative |
| 3. Click to signup | Clicks that install or register | 30% | Your store or landing page |
| 4. Payer rate | Signups that actually pay | 8%, but freemium runs 2% to 5% | Your paywall, entirely |
Multiplying those four median values together reproduces the $35 figure:
$13.48 buys 1,000 impressions (2025 Meta median CPM)1,000
At a 1.5% CTR, $0.90 per click15
At a 30% store or landing page conversion, $3.00 per install4.5
At an 8% install-to-payer rate0.36
Cost of one paying customer$37.44
- Cost per customer is just cost per install divided by your payer rate. At a 20% payer rate a paying customer costs 5x the install cost. At a 3% payer rate a paying customer costs 33x the install cost.
- Improving all four funnel stages by 40% cuts cost per customer by 74%, not 40%.
- Reproducing the $35 figure needs about an 8% payer rate, well above the 2% to 5% of installs that pay in a typical freemium app.
Use Repeat Recorder to practise the opening of a video ad
On a video ad, the share of people who click is mostly decided by the talking in the first few seconds. Repeat Recorder, one of my own apps, records you and plays the take straight back hands-free.
- Repeat Recorder plays each take back automatically and then starts recording again, so the same opening line can be run twenty times hands-free.
- Improving all four funnel stages by 40% cuts the cost of a paying customer by 74%, so even a small gain in click rate is worth having. The opening seconds of a video ad are one of the few steps between seeing an ad and paying that you can improve for free.
- Repeat Recorder takes worth keeping go into favourites and into folders you name yourself, so two versions of the same opening line sit next to each other.
The cheapest click is almost never the cheapest customer
Two things decide whether an ad channel is any use: what a paying customer costs there, and whether you can keep buying more customers there.
| Channel | Cost per click or tap | Cost per install or signup | Typical cost to obtain a paying customer | Intent of the person you reach | If you double your budget, do you get twice the customers? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Ads (App Store search) | $2.25 per tap | $2.51 to $3.76 | $13 to $25 | Highest. They typed your category into the store | No. Only so many people search your keywords. The extra budget goes unspent |
| Google App Campaigns, Android | Low. Google picks the bid | $1.92 | $24 | Mixed. Search, Play, YouTube and banners at once | Mostly yes. Four places to show the ad, so it rarely runs out of room |
| Google App Campaigns, iOS | Low. Google picks the bid | $5.84, 3x the Android price | $73 against Android's $24 | Mixed. The same four places | Mostly, but blind. Apple's privacy rules delay your results by 1 to 3 days |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | $0.30 per click | $2.09 and up | $42 to $48 | Low. You interrupted them | Mostly yes. Plenty of ad slots, and a test answers in days |
| TikTok | Low. The cheapest feed there is | $1.00 to $3.00 | $13 to $60 | Lowest. They came to be entertained | For a while. Each video ad stops working within days, so you need new ones constantly |
| Google Search (web, not app) | $1.60 to $8.58 by industry | Varies with your landing page | $49 | Very high. They typed the problem into Google | Partly. Capped by how many people search. You can only buy a bigger share |
| Google Display | Very low | High. Only 0.07% of banners get clicked, so it takes a great many of them | $76 | Lowest. Nobody looks at banners | Yes, endlessly. Always another banner slot. That is why it is cheap and converts badly |
| Meta retargeting (people who visited your site) | $0.50 to $1.20. Dearer than Meta's $0.30 cold click | 3x cheaper than cold Meta | $80. Meta will claim $22 | High. They visited you before | No. The list is last month's visitors. More money just repeats the same ad |
| Google Display retargeting (banners that follow you) | Very low | Better than cold display, but blocked cookies delete most of the list | $138. Google will claim $38 | Medium. They visited, but not today | No. You can only reach people already on your list |
| Google Search retargeting (bid more when a past visitor searches) | Higher. You bid up for these people on purpose | Best of the three | $95. Google will claim $26 | Highest. Searching now, and they know you | No. They must visit you and then search. Two limits at once |
| App Store Optimisation (organic) | Free | Free | $0. You pay in time | Highest. The same people as Apple Ads | No. Money buys none of it. 400 installs a month stays 400 |
| Referral programme (users invite friends for a reward) | Free | $0.50 to $2.00 | $25 to $65, reward included | Highest. A friend recommended you | No. It is a share of your users, so it grows only when you do |
The cheapest customers come from the channels you cannot buy more of.
- The cheap cost per customer that Meta and Google report for retargeting is not real. Meta says a retargeted customer costs $22, but only about a quarter of those buyers needed the ad, so the real price is $80. On Google Display the real price is $138. The full working is in the retargeting article.
- iOS costs 3x Android, and the gap survives all the way to the customer. On Google App Campaigns an iOS install costs $5.84 against $1.92 on Android. A paying iOS customer costs $73 against $24 on Android.
- A bigger ad budget cannot create more people who want what you sell, so it makes a channel expensive only by pushing your bid higher. To spend a bigger budget, the platform's automated bidding bids higher, so the cost of each install or customer climbs.
What separates channels is whether the person is looking now
Familiarity is whether people have heard of you. Intent is whether they want what you sell at this moment. Only intent predicts what a paying customer costs.
| Where the ad appears | Have they heard of you? | Are they looking for it right now? | Typical cost to obtain a paying customer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Ads, App Store search | No, completely cold | Yes, they typed your category into the store | $13 to $25 |
| Google Search | No, completely cold | Yes, they described the problem in the search box | About $49 |
| Meta and TikTok feeds | No, completely cold | No, you interrupted them mid-scroll | $13 to $60 |
| Google Display banners | No, completely cold | No, and often not really looking at the page either | About $76 |
| Retargeting, on any of the above | Yes, warm, they visited you before | Sometimes, you are reminding rather than introducing | Meta and Google will say $22 to $38. The truth is $80 to $138 |
- Apple Ads, Google Search, Meta and TikTok feeds and Google Display all reach people who have never heard of you, so familiarity cannot explain their six-fold range in cost per customer.
- Apple Ads costs $13 to $25 a customer because somebody typed your category into the App Store search box. Google Display banners reach strangers who have never heard of you and are looking for nothing, for about $76 a paying customer.
- Retargeting , showing ads to people who visited you before, is the only option that reaches people who know you, and at $80 to $138 a real paying customer it is also the most expensive. Retargeting ads convert 3.8% of clicks against 1.5% for ads shown to strangers, which is why retargeting looks cheap.
An ad platform's CPA is the cost of an install, not of a paying customer
- When an ad platform says "CPA", it almost never means a paying customer. Apple defines CPA as spend divided by installs, so the widely quoted Apple Ads figure of $2.51 to $3.76 is a cost per download.
- Quoting an install cost as a customer cost understates your real cost by 10x or more. At a 5% payer rate, each paying customer costs 20x the $3.35 price of one install.
- Meta's cost per purchase is one of the few published ad figures that genuinely is a payment. Google Ads, by contrast, counts "conversions" that are frequently just leads rather than payments.
- Every channel's cost per paying customer on this page is an install cost divided by an assumed payer rate, and your own payer rate will not be the median. The only exceptions are Meta's cost per purchase and the three retargeting costs.
Eight things move your cost per customer, and the bid is weakest
If the ad auction set the cost of a customer, the spread between advertisers would be narrow. The spread is not narrow.
| Lever | How much it moves cost per customer | Evidence | How hard it is to do | How soon you see the result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where you put the paywall (pay first, or use free and pay later) | Up 8x on revenue per install | Strong: $3.09 per install at day 60 against $0.38 for freemium | Low, a product decision | Immediate, within a week |
| Creative quality and volume of tests | Down 40% to 60% per install for the best 10% of advertisers | Strong: top 10% ship 5x more variants per week | High, a permanent production process | Weeks |
| Which country you advertise in | Down 14x on what an ad costs, down 90x on what a download pays its developer | Strong, and the plainest number in this article. An Indian download pays developers about $0.05 against $4.60 in the US, from 25.5 billion Indian downloads in 2025 | Very easy, one setting | The cheaper cost shows up straight away. The missing revenue takes months to notice |
| Advertising to past visitors instead of strangers (retargeting) | Up about 2x. Meta reports $22, but a real customer costs $80 | Strong, and it runs the wrong way: a holdout test finds the ads caused only 27.5% of the sales credited to them | Low, but it needs traffic you already paid for | Months, until you run a holdout test |
| Channel intent (search vs feed) | Down roughly 10x at the install stage | Medium: Apple Ads convert 67.2% of taps to installs, feeds convert far less | Medium, needs keyword work | Fast |
| Trial length and structure | Up about 1.7x on the share of trials that pay | Real but not a straight line: 17 to 32 day trials convert at 42.5% against 25.5% under 4 days | Trivial, one setting | Slow, you must wait out the trial |
| Bid strategy, keywords and audience settings | Under 2x either way, and usually far less | Medium: the ad itself now matters more than targeting | Medium, and it eats far more time than it deserves | Immediate |
| Seasonality and when you run | Up 1.3x to 1.6x in the October to December run-up | Strong: CPMs rise 30% to 60% from October to December | Trivial, a calendar decision | Immediate |
The ad settings people spend the most time on, bids, keywords and audiences, move the cost of a customer the least:
- Making better ads is a production problem, not a taste problem. The top 10% of advertisers ship 5x more versions of their ads every week.
- Moving the paywall, the point where an app asks for money, swings revenue per install 8x, costs nothing and shows up within a week.
- Since Apple and Google cut off most tracking data, the ad itself explains more of the price difference between advertisers than any targeting setting does.
- Advertising in a cheap country and retargeting both look like savings but lose money. A cheap country makes a download 14x cheaper to buy while people there spend about 90x less. Meta reports a retargeted customer at $22, but a real one costs $80.
Meta impressions cost five times more than display banners and still buy cheaper customers
A CPM is the price of a thousand impressions, not one. The $13.48 Meta median is about 1.3 cents to put your ad in front of one person. Which ad platform you use changes the CPM roughly 7x:
- Google Display and TikTok ads are the cheapest to show, at $2.80 to $3.50 per thousand impressions. Google Display costs $3.12 per thousand impressions.
- Meta costs about five times more, $13.48 per thousand impressions worldwide. Meta costs $16 to $23 per thousand impressions in the US.
- Cheap Google Display impressions buy expensive customers. Google Display ads are clicked by 0.07% of viewers. Google Display ads cost $75.51 per conversion, against Meta's $41.94 to $48.18 per measured purchase.
CPM sets a hard floor of about $11 in a rich country
You cannot pay less for impressions than the next advertiser bids. An advertiser in the top 10% at every stage, in a rich country, still pays about $11 per paying customer:
$8.00 buys 1,000 impressions, a discount platforms give ads people engage with1,000
At a 2.0% CTR, $0.40 per click20
At a 30% store page conversion, $1.33 per install6.0
At a 12% install-to-payer rate, which requires a hard paywall0.72
Cost of one paying customer$11.11
Check any funnel you build against published install costs
At an $8 CPM, a 3% click-through rate with a 45% store conversion implies a $0.59 install, but North American installs cost $2.50 to $5.28.
$10 to $15 is the least you can realistically pay for one paying customer on Facebook or Instagram in a rich country like the US, UK or Australia. On Apple's search ads it works out at $13 to $25.
Ads in India cost 14x less than in the US, but each download there earns about 90x less
| Market | Meta CPM | What that does to your cost per customer | What it does to revenue per customer | Whether the swap is actually worth making |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $16.08 to $23.00 | Highest, the benchmark case | Highest willingness and ability to pay | Neutral, expensive but the money is there |
| Canada | $14.03 | Slightly lower | High, close to US behaviour | Often favourable, a common first test market |
| Australia | $11.04 | Moderately lower | High, strong subscription adoption | Often favourable |
| United Kingdom | $10.85 | Moderately lower | High | Often favourable |
| Latin America (broad) | Low, installs land at $0.50 to $2.00 | Lower, but only once you discount the price | Much lower average revenue per user | Roughly a wash unless you price locally |
| India | $1.36 | Lowest, ads are 14x cheaper than the US | Lowest, about $0.05 a download, and card-based subscription friction is high | Usually a loss for a paid app: ads 14x cheaper, revenue about 90x lower |
| Nigeria | $1.50 | Almost as low as India | Lowest | Usually a loss for a paid app, for the same reason as India |
Why cheap countries do not work, in one comparison
Ads in India are 14x cheaper than in the US. Indian customers spend about 90x less per download. Reaching a thousand people costs $16 to $23 in the US and $1.36 in India. Divide what each country spent in the app stores by its downloads, and one download pays developers about $4.60 in the US against $0.05 in India.
India is the world's largest app market by downloads and does not make the top 20 by consumer spending. India made 25.5 billion app downloads in 2025 against America's 12.6 billion.
Indian app spending is growing from a very low base. Indian app spending hit a record $345 million in one quarter, up 35% year on year. Indian spending is still too small to aim a subscription app at, unless you price for the local market.
Use Camera to Clipboard to move store screenshots off your phone
An app store listing turns a click into an install. For a phone app, the listing's screenshots are taken on a phone. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, puts a picture from the phone onto the computer clipboard straight away.
- Screenshots already sitting in the phone’s library can be sent to the computer several at a time, so a whole set arrives in one go. Camera to Clipboard sends the screenshots directly from the phone to the computer over your own local network.
- In the median ad funnel an app store page turns about 30% of clicks into installs, and redoing its screenshots costs an afternoon rather than an ad budget.
- A picture from Camera to Clipboard arrives as an ordinary clipboard image, so Photoshop and GIMP open it as a new layer and Word and Google Docs take it inline.
The same $1,000 buys 90 customers or 1.2 customers
Each of these five ad funnels uses the same platform, country, budget and week. Only how well the advertiser does their job changes.
| Funnel | CPM paid | Click-through rate | Click to install or signup | Install or signup to paying | Cost to obtain a paying customer | Customers per $1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 10% at every stage | $8.00 | 2.0% | 30% | 12% | $11.11 | 90 |
| Above average at every stage | $11.00 | 2.0% | 30% | 8% | $22.92 | 44 |
| Average at every stage: the $35 rumour | $13.48 | 1.5% | 30% | 8% | $37.44 | 27 |
| Average, but only 2.5% of signups pay | $13.48 | 1.5% | 30% | 2.5% | $119.82 | 8 |
| Below average at every stage | $20.00 | 0.8% | 20% | 1.5% | $833.33 | 1.2 |
The cost of a paying customer spreads 75x across these five funnels, from four numbers, none of which is the bid.
- All five of these funnels buy ads in the same country, and the CPM still runs from $8 to $20. Meta charges less to show an ad people stop and engage with.
- Dropping the payer rate from 8% to the 2% to 5% that freemium apps actually run triples the cost of a paying customer to $119.82. The $35 benchmark assumes a hard paywall, where you pay before you can use the product.
- Going from the median to above average needs only a cheaper CPM and a better click rate, and takes the cost of a paying customer from $37 to $23.
You do not lower cost per customer by buying ads better. You lower it by getting more of your signups to pay, and then buying ads.
The cheapest customers cost time instead of money
With ads, another advertiser bidding against you sets the price. Nobody bids against you for a good app store listing, or for one friend telling another.
| Channel | Cost to obtain a paying customer | Why it is cheap | What stops you simply getting more | Does it keep working after you stop? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referral programme (you reward users for inviting friends) | $25 to $65, reward included | Your existing users do the persuading for free, and you only hand over the reward when it actually worked | The size of your user base, and the fact that only a small share of people ever invite anyone | Yes, it grows as you grow |
| Plain word of mouth (no programme, no reward) | Nothing at all | Someone simply tells a friend because the product was worth mentioning | You cannot act on it directly: it follows from the product being good, not from any campaign | Yes, and it is the most durable of the lot |
| App Store Optimisation | Nothing in cash. You pay in time: the keywords, the title, the screenshots, the reviews | Reaches the same searching people as Apple Ads, and you are not charged per tap | Search volume for your terms | Slowly, and rankings can be lost |
| Content and SEO | Your time rather than money | An article that ranks keeps bringing people in after you stop writing | How fast you can publish | Strongly, the main reason to do it |
| Forums and community | Your time rather than money | You borrow an audience somebody else spent years building | Your own credibility and hours | Yes, reputation carries forward |
| Citation in AI answers | Your time rather than money | The recommendation arrives already trusted, because a machine gave it rather than an advert | Not directly controllable | Yes, once sources are established |
| Paid ads, for comparison | $11 to $833 | Paid ads are not cheap, they are always available | Only your budget | No, it stops the day you stop paying |
Every channel cheaper than ads is capped by something money cannot buy. If your app store listing brings 400 installs a month, no amount of money makes it 4,000.
The averaging trap that makes ads look cheaper than they are
Divide your total ad spend by all your new customers, including the free ones who found you through search or a friend, and you get a flattering number. That blended number tells you what your average customer cost, never what the next customer bought with ads will cost. The cost of that next customer is what decides whether to spend more on ads.
Work out both the blended cost and the ads-only cost per customer, and decide ad spending on the ads-only one.
A $35 customer has to pay you about $124 to be worth buying
Working backwards from a cost per customer (CAC) gives you a minimum price:
One customer costs you$35.00
At the usual rule that a customer should return 3x what they cost, revenue needed after the store cut$105.00
Add back Apple and Google's 15% cut for small businesses (30% by default)$123.53
Spread over a typical 5-month paying life, the price you must charge$24.71/mo
Almost nothing in the consumer app market is priced at $25 a month, so at a $35 CAC, a normally-priced subscription app cannot buy customers profitably.
$21.37 is all one paying customer pays the average app in a whole year, measured across 115,000 apps. So the average app loses $14 on every $35 customer it buys, before Apple or Google take a cut.
Ask what cost per customer your price actually supports
For a given price and a given number of months customers stay, there is exactly one maximum cost per customer (CAC) you can afford.
| What you charge | Gross per customer | Net after the 15% cut | CAC you can afford at 3:1 | When you get your money back |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $4.99/mo, 5 months | $24.95 | $21.21 | $7.07 | Month 4 or later |
| $9.99/mo, 5 months | $49.95 | $42.46 | $14.15 | Month 4 or later |
| $9.99/mo, 12 months | $119.88 | $101.90 | $33.97 | Month 4 or later |
| $79/year, paid up front | $79.00 | $67.15 | $22.38 | Day one |
| What a $35 CAC actually requires | $123.53 | $105.00 | $35.00 | Depends on the plan |
- A $4.99 a month app whose customers stay 5 months can afford a $7.07 cost per customer, not $35, which is why cheap apps fail at paid acquisition.
- Selling an annual plan is the cheapest fix when your price cannot support your cost per customer. An annual plan at $79 up front supports a $22.38 CAC and repays it on day one, even with 72% of customers cancelling in the first year.
- A $35 cost per customer needs an annual plan above $120 or a monthly plan above $20. If you cannot charge that much, get your cost per customer down to about $10.
Payback period is the constraint that actually kills small companies
A healthy time to earn back what a customer cost is under 12 months, and 60 to 90 days for mobile subscriptions.
A $9.99 monthly subscriber takes four months to repay a $35 CAC, while an annual plan repays on day one. So with annual plans the same $1,000 of ad spend buys customers repeatedly through the year instead of once.
Use Repeat Recorder to practise saying a higher price out loud
For most small products the fix is a higher price rather than cheaper advertising, and the hard part is saying that price without apologising for it. Repeat Recorder, another of my own apps, records you and plays the take straight back hands-free.
- Repeat Recorder plays each take back automatically and then starts recording again, so the same sentence can be said twenty times hands-free. Hearing yourself say “a hundred and twenty dollars a year” half a dozen times shows whether you believe it.
- An annual plan at $79 paid up front supports a $22.38 cost per customer and repays on day one, so the annual price is the sentence worth getting right.
- Repeat Recorder takes worth keeping go into favourites and into folders you name yourself, so the monthly pitch and the annual pitch sit side by side.
Work out your own floor and your minimum price
Set the four multipliers to what you actually measure, or use the presets to load the five example funnels from this article. Add your price, retention and store cut. The calculator returns the two numbers that matter: what a customer costs, and what you must charge for that to be worth doing.
Getting signups to pay beats every setting in the ad account
The steps to get more signups to pay, in order, for a small independent product:
- 1. Measure the four steps from ad to paying customer separately, before anything else. What 1,000 people cost to reach, how many clicked, how many signed up, how many paid.
- 2. Get more of your signups to pay, because no setting in the ad account lowers the cost of a customer as much.
- 3. The biggest thing that moves the share of signups who pay is when you ask for money. Pay-before-use apps earned $3.09 per install by day 60, against $0.38 for free-to-use apps.
- 4. Test a longer free trial, but do not assume longer is always better. Free trials of 17 to 32 days convert 42.5% of trials into payers, against 25.5% for trials under four days. But trials of 5 to 9 days are far more common in health and fitness, education and travel apps.
- 5. Make many ads rather than one good ad. The best 10% of advertisers pay 40% to 60% less per install.
Test search ads before ads to strangers, and set your price from what a customer costs
- 1. Start where people are already searching for what you sell. Apple Ads tells you inside a week whether searchers will actually pay, for hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.
- 2. Advertise to strangers after search has told you people will pay, not before. Ads to strangers reach the most people, but each paying customer from them costs more.
- 3. Work out the lowest price you can sell at, from what a customer really costs you. Multiply your cost per customer by 3, divide by 0.85 to cover the store's cut, then divide by how many months people stay.
- 4. Sell an annual plan before you raise the ad budget. With an annual plan, twelve months of money arrives on day one.
- 5. Keep app store listing work and referrals running the whole time, because you cannot buy more of them on demand.
Conclusion: how low the cost of a paying customer can go
- The cost of one paying customer is four numbers multiplied together, not a price you can look up. A cheaper install is not a cheaper customer until you divide by the share who pay.
- A paying customer costs $10 to $15 at best on paid social and $13 to $25 on search ads, and the widely quoted $35 median only holds while about 8% of installs pay. At the 2% to 5% most free apps really run, identical ad buying costs $120 per paying customer.
- Getting more of your signups to pay beats every setting in the ad account, and asking for money earlier is the single biggest move. Apps that make you pay before you can really use the thing earned $3.09 per install by day 60, against $0.38 for apps that stay free and hope.