The Hottest Trend in Apps Right Now - How Much Are AI Chatbots Making?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - It Happened!. Check out the full article for more insights.
AI chatbots have really taken over the App Store. This isn't the first time I said that (third, actually) and while it may not last forever (it won't) it's very hot right now.
Like, millions of downloads and dollars hot. And that's plenty hot.
I've seen quite a few AI chatbot apps make it into the App Store over the last few weeks, and have been asked by many if they should get into it as well. Why? It's really easy, really in demand, and did I say really easy?
Most AI chatbots provide a native interface for ChatGPT, and use very aggressive pricing to (somehow) charge more than what ChatGPT actually costs on the web. And the web interface is simple enough -- that's how I do all of my chatting.
Too easy to be worth big coin, right?
Wrong!
I used Explorer to identify all of the apps that have "AI" and "chatbot" in their name and are making more than $1,000,000 per month on the App Store, which is super easy to do with Explorer, and that search identified exactly five apps.
The apps are AI Chat, Genie, AI Smith, Ask AI, and ChatOn. Oh, and this list is ranked by revenue since the beginning of the year.
According to our estimates, the five apps in the "Million Club" have earned a combined total of $20.2M of net revenue from the App Store since January. And that's net, meaning what the happy developers get to keep and reinvest into ads. Apple got about $8M in fees.
From 5 apps.
If you're a developer and you've used any of these apps you can guess how long they took to build. If you're not -- not long...
I also summed them up and plotted their daily revenue over time so I can see where it started and where it is now.
In January, the group earned a total of $2.9M of net revenue. All apps were around with the exception of Ask AI. The total rose to $3.9M in March and then ballooned to $9.8M in April. And you probably know this by now but this is all net, meaning what the developers get to keep.
There's a new AI app that I saw climbing the charts this week called Ninja AI. I tried a bunch and they're really all the same. I wonder when OpenAI will just release its own, or when users will realize they can access ChatGPT for free online.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
