My little Safari dark mode app just crossed its first $100 — but the 50 five-star reviews from 10+ countries are what actually got me
This week two things happened at the same time and I'm still processing it: my app crossed its first $100 in revenue, and its rating hit 4.9★ cross 49 reviews from more than 10 countries.
Some honest context, because I know how these posts can sound:
The first 90 days after launch I made $48. Not $48 a day — $48 total. There were whole weeks at $0, and one week my entire revenue was a single $4 sale... followed by a $4 refund. I kept a spreadsheet anyway, because I figured if I was going to fail I at least wanted the data.
The app is a dark mode extension for Safari (iPhone, iPad and Mac — one purchase covers all of them, no subscription). I built it because I read a lot at night and my eyes were done with white websites.
What actually kept me going wasn't the revenue. It was the emails.
I put a small feedback button in the app, expecting silence. Instead, people from countries I've never visited started writing to me — bug reports with screenshots, kind words, and feature requests. One user wrote, in Spanish, asking if the app could follow the system's dark mode automatically instead of its own schedule. Another one ended a suggestion with "A toggle on the page itself to switch modes would have been great. Personal opinion though." — the politeness of that "personal opinion though" made my day.
And here's the part I didn't expect when I started: some of the app's best features weren't my ideas. Following the system appearance automatically? A user asked for that. Custom fonts for reading? Users asked for that too. At this point a real chunk of the roadmap is just me working through what people wrote in. It turns out 49 people who care enough to review your app — and the ones who email — are worth more than any product plan I could have written alone.
So this post is mostly a thank-you — to the people who reviewed, emailed, reported bugs with screenshots at 2am their time, and told me what to build next. If you're a solo dev sitting on week six of $0 revenue: the spreadsheet looks dead until suddenly it doesn't.