How Do Free Apps Make Money 8 Ways To Get Started

Posted on the 19 March 2018 by David Mark @Ataghan_micheal

Today I'm going to show you how free apps actually make money and 8 ways they actually do it, and also give you some resources you can check out in case you are interested, and also some example of apps that actually do this, in case you want to check them out to see how they do it and how they are making money.

You would notice that in app stores. Some of the top earning apps are free apps, so they make more money than a lot of the paid apps that you have to pay to download.

Below are the 8 different ways they do these


1. In-App Purchases

You can get a free app, but it might be hard to keep leveling up in your app or it might take too long, so you might spend some money to get some other stuff that allows you to play the game better, to upgrade faster, whatever it's you are trying to do with the game or the app.Confusion: This is what that means.


Pokeman Go is a very popular app and it got millions of download as you can see. Is one example of a free app that is very popular and makes a lot of money of off in-app purchases.

They have a store within that app that allows you to buy an upgrade and things that you need within the app that help you when playing the game, if you run out of resources, you can buy it with in-app purchases.There is a lot of different things you can purchase within the app for a different price point, and that is how they make their money.

2. Ads

For example: When you are using an app like ESPN. You can see that the app is free, you download it, you spend time looking at scores, or you spend time watching news about scores

But you would see ads between some of the scores, and if you click that ads they get paid. In their videos, there is a quick advertisement at the very first of the video before it gets to the actual content. They get paid for all these different ads within their video, in their scores, etc.

3. Sponsorships

For example, Evernote actually did a sponsorship deal with Post-it Note. Becuase it's a note taking the app for business and product, they get more branding, more sales, and more customers because it related to their business

Post-it Note would pay Evernote to get feature within the Evernote app.Even if it's a free app you can have sponsorship where you just feature other businesses within your app and exchange for them paying you a certain amount of money.

4. Affiliate Income

Affiliate is where you sign-up with a company like Amazon affiliate or the click-bank affiliate program, where you promote peoples product and you get paid when people buy through your links

"Wish" Is an example of a free app that makes money with affiliate income, by advertising cool retain product they earn referrals coming from.You might get the stuff for a discount, but they make money when you by from this app because the app sends you to their referral link and make them money.It's a very popular app because they have cool stuff, but it also helps them, even if it's a free app they still make money from all the affiliate links.

5. Subscriptions

For instant: The Kardashians sisters are very popular and they are trying every way they can to build on their popularity. One thing they do is, they each have their own app now. They have a free app that probably gives you some free beauty tutorial and fashion adverse within the app. But to get all of their tips and inside world, like videos, some private things that are going on in their life, you have to pay $2.99 a month subscription.

When you download the app for free, you might get a little bit of content, but to get most of it, like premium content, you have to actually pay a subscription

Is a cheap subscription, but if you have millions of people downloading the app, then you can make a lot of money. So that is another thing you can do, just for having a subscription app.

6. Freemiums

This means, you have a really great free product like Evernote where people can use the free app and if they love it, they might need to upgrade, or they might want to get another feature that would allow them to share their note with other people.

Evernote gives to a chance on every page of their app at the button where you can upgrade the app and pay a monthly subscription.

That is another thing Evernote do to make money, not only do they get sponsor deal, but they make money from a freemium standpoint where they charge upgrade fee if you need an additional feature, that the free version doesn't give you.
If you are doing that you want to make sure the free app is very high quality as well.


7. Email Marketing

You can also make money from email marketing. You can build a list by using Facebook SDK to make it where your app actually gets a facebook profile sign-up. If you want people to sign-up to use your app.One way to do it is to put in the facebook SDK code within the development of the app, and that allows you to get people to sign-in using Facebook on your app. That way you can collect the email address that they associate with their Facebook account.You can also use something like LeadLayer which is like a third party to Facebook SDK, it also allows you to collect email through your app. 

Or you just have a place where they create an account just like they would on a regular websiteWhen you collect this email, you might offer everything for free and not even be having any ads.But when you collect emails, that person email is very valuable to your business because you can use it to sell solo ads when people want to market to your email list.You can promote your coupon and different product, services, your blog content through the email list.There is a lot of different ways to make money with an email list.

8. Cost Per Install

This is where you get paid every time someone installs the app. Playhaven is an example of these
You make money every time someone installs the app, it's just another way to make money, helping Playhaven become more popular, and they would pay you for just getting a result and getting people to install it.
ConclusionThere is a lot of different ways to make money and this is just with free apps, so you don't even need to have a paid app to make a lot of money.If you want to develop your own app go for it.Okay folks, if you like this article share with your friend. And don't forget to subscribe below to get great content like these.