How Indie Apps Reach $1M ARR: Real Numbers

A handful of indie subscription apps have published the numbers behind their climb to $1 million in annual recurring revenue, and the honest version is slower and lumpier than the launch threads suggest. Slopes took nine years; Cal AI did it inside a year with creator spend; most apps that start down this road never pass $10,000 a month.

What "$1M ARR" means for an app

ARR is the annualised value of active subscriptions: roughly 1,200 annual subscribers at $69.99, or 2,800 at $29.99, after the store's cut if you count it the way most founders do. Curtis Herbert of Slopes reports his revenue before Apple's 15% commission ¹, and that is the convention for most public numbers below. Treat any figure that does not say gross or net as gross.

The base rate is brutal. RevenueCat's 2026 State of Subscription Apps, built on anonymised data from apps using its SDK, found that 17.3% of new apps reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within two years and only 4.6% reach $10,000 a month. The median app earns about $72 a month one year after launch; the top 10% earn more than $2,574 a month ¹⁵. $1M ARR, or about $83,000 a month, sits well above even that top decile.

Documented cases

The table only includes apps where the founder, or a named publication quoting them, put a number on the record.

Mojo, the video-template app, also talked publicly about passing $1M ARR, but it is a YC-backed company with around 20 staff, so it does not belong in an indie list ¹⁶. Visible and Fitbod took some outside money too; Visible says it reached about $7M in revenue while cash-flow positive before a small Series A ⁹.

Slopes: the slow ramp

Slopes is the clearest public record because Herbert has written "Slopes Diaries" posts since 2016. The app launched in 2013 as a paid download and made $10,600 in its first two years. Around 2015 he moved to an annual subscription, later dropping the monthly plan because skiers churned every spring and replacing it with consumable season passes ¹.

From there the curve was steady rather than viral: roughly 2.5x revenue growth a year through 2017, when a winter brought about $40,000 ³; 1.4x in the 2019/20 season, which he attributed partly to roughly $60,000 of pandemic-related lost revenue; about $20,000 a year on Apple Search Ads that he says paid for itself ⁴. He tweeted the $1M ARR milestone in early 2022 and won an Apple Design Award the same year ⁵. By then annual operating costs were around $300,000 excluding his own salary, with one marketing hire ¹.

Cal AI: the paid ramp

Cal AI, founded in 2024 by Zach Yadegari and co-founders while still in their teens, reached more than $30 million in revenue within two years and was acquired by MyFitnessPal in March 2026 ^6,7. The subscription is cheap, around $30 a year, because the founders say they optimised for reach rather than margin ⁸.

The engine was creators. COO Jake Castillo described a pipeline that at its peak had 50 to 70 influencers posting on a single day, with payouts capped by expected revenue per thousand views, flat-rate deals preferred so that viral outliers were cheap, and a "renewal score" to decide which creators to re-sign. Not everything worked: paying UFC fighters produced no measurable download spike at all ⁸.

The middle: Visible, Hevy, HabitKit

Visible is the organic-plus-paid hybrid. The team built a free app first, spent more than a year without revenue, and turned on subscriptions in October 2023. Every visitor goes to a web landing page with a qualifying quiz before the app; Meta is the only paid channel and brings about half of new users, with word of mouth bringing the other half. ARR went from $1M to $10M in two years without a single paywall test ⁹.

Hevy is the no-ads version. Guillem Ros told RevenueCat in 2023 that the workout tracker had passed two million downloads in about four years with roughly $15,000 of lifetime ad spend, half of that growth in the previous five months, and that the team deliberately kept prices low ¹⁰. In 2022 the founders were quoted at about $20,000 a month across both stores with an eight-person team ¹¹; a later Reddit claim of $160K MRR could not be verified.

HabitKit shows the typical pace. Röhl quit his job in early 2022, launched in November 2022, went back to a four-day job in 2023 when revenue was not enough to live on, quit again in February 2024, and reached $10,000 MRR late that year after a MKBHD feature produced the best month in the app's history ¹². That is a successful indie app two years in, and it is still an order of magnitude away from $1M ARR.

Common patterns

Annual plans dominate. Slopes dropped monthly entirely ¹; Visible pushes the $14.99 annual rate ⁹; Hevy's yearly plan is roughly six months of monthly ¹¹. Annual billing front-loads cash and hides seasonal churn.

Pricing follows the use pattern. Season passes for a winter sport, a cheap annual for a calorie tracker that people use daily, a monthly plan for a health condition that changes.

One channel, worked hard. Apple Search Ads for Slopes, creators for Cal AI, Meta for Visible. Nobody in this list ran five channels at once.

Public numbers are part of the marketing. Herbert says sharing revenue keeps him ahead of the curve and brings inbound attention ²; Röhl's blog and newsletter are how the MKBHD team found him ¹².

How this shows up in the charts

None of these apps reached $1M ARR by sitting at the top of the overall free chart. They live in category charts and in grossing, which is where subscription revenue is visible. Use the top apps view and switch to grossing within Health & Fitness or Productivity to find apps in the $1–10M band: they are usually between rank 50 and 300 in grossing and often outside the top 500 free.

Watch the US iOS movers for the signature of a creator campaign like Cal AI's: a sudden jump of hundreds of places in the free chart, followed a few weeks later by a smaller but stickier rise in grossing as trials convert. A Slopes-style ramp barely moves the free chart at all; its growth shows up as a slow, seasonal climb in the Sports grossing chart every winter. Our guide to how App Store rankings work covers why grossing rank lags downloads by the length of your trial.

A realistic plan

If you are starting now, the published cases suggest a sequence: ship a free app and find a niche with a high willingness to pay; move to annual pricing within the first year; pick one acquisition channel and measure it for six months; expect $1,000 MRR around month two and $10,000 MRR around month four if you are in the top 5%, per RevenueCat's medians ¹⁵; and budget for the fact that the median path from $10K MRR to $1M ARR, where it happens at all, is measured in years rather than quarters.