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From a Rork-Built App to Monthly Break-Even at 100 Yen Subscription: Indie Numbers from May 2026
A small Rork-built utility app reached month-over-month break-even on a 100 yen subscription combined with AdMob. May 2026 numbers, decisions, and what I deliberately left out.
I shipped a small utility app built with Rork in mid-March, and by early May it had landed at month-over-month break-even. The price structure is a 100 yen monthly subscription combined with AdMob, which I think is honestly the absolute minimum-viable shape for indie monetization. Here are the actual numbers, the design choices, and what I deliberately left out.
I am Masaki Hirokawa, an artist and indie developer running wallpaper apps since 2014 (over 50 million downloads across the portfolio). I built this small app as a new experiment - the numbers below are from that new app, not the wallpaper portfolio.
Why I chose 100 yen monthly
The Rork-built app is a tiny habit tracker. I debated between 100 yen, 450 yen, and 480 yen monthly. Why I landed on 100:
For an indie utility this small, justifying 480 yen per month from a user is genuinely hard.
100 yen is "cheap enough to not feel wasted if you cancel, but easy to keep if it becomes habit".
It fits inside the lowest subscription tier on both App Store and Google Play.
At 100 yen times a 70% monthly retention rate, 50 paying users yields about 3,500 yen of recurring monthly revenue.
That last estimation mattered. Recurring revenue from 50 paying users plus AdMob impressions covers the Rork subscription cost and the App Store / Play 15% fee with a small margin.
May 2026 actuals (this app only)
May 1 to May 31 numbers:
Downloads: about 1,800 (organic only, no paid acquisition)
7-day retention: 28%
30-day retention: 11%
Conversion to paying: 1.8%
Paying users at month-end: 41
AdMob revenue: 7,820 yen (eCPM around 180 yen, impressions-based)
Subscription revenue (gross): 4,100 yen
Rork subscription cost: 3,800 yen
App Store / Play fees (15%): 615 yen
Net revenue: 7,505 yen
7,505 yen of profit is not impressive in absolute terms. But this is organic-only, with no paid spend, in roughly the first full month. What matters is that the slope is no longer negative, which is the starting point for actually growing.
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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
✦Actual May 2026 revenue and cost breakdown for the Rork-built app
✦Why the AdMob 80% / subscription 20% mix is what closed the gap
✦When 100 yen monthly is the right price for indie utilities, and when it is not
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How the AdMob 80% / subscription 20% split happens
About 80% of revenue comes from AdMob, 20% from subscriptions. Utility apps are often described as "subscription-first with ads as a supplement", but at 100 yen monthly the ratios flip. That was deliberate - the subscription side is meant as a recurring floor, not the headline.
On the AdMob side, I cap rewarded ads to 3 plays per day. Each play unlocks Pro features (ad-free) for that day. This creates a two-tier base: light users who consume rewarded ads, and light paying users who subscribe to remove ads entirely. About 80 rewarded unlocks happen per day, which is what pushes AdMob's eCPM higher than I expected.
To RevenueCat or not
This is where indie devs reasonably disagree. For this app I decided not to use RevenueCat. The reasons:
- The fixed monthly RevenueCat cost would be a non-trivial percentage of revenue at the 100-yen-per-month subscription level.- Apple/Google Server Notifications v2 are something I can handle with the receipt-handling code that already runs the wallpaper apps.- I run my own receipt validation server at api.dolice.asia, so RevenueCat's value-add would mostly overlap with what I already have.
If I bumped the subscription price to 480 yen or higher, or if I expanded to multiple apps with this monetization model, I would move to RevenueCat without hesitation. At this scale, reusing in-house code is the more rational economics. That is the whole reasoning.
Lifting Rork-generated code to production quality
The work between Rork's first-draft output and an App Store-ready build:
Consolidate Swift dependencies into Package.swift (the generated output mixed in CocoaPods-style references).
Centralize AdMob and StoreKit 2 verdicts inside an Entitlement class.
Add Crashlytics and Firebase Remote Config.
Bring ATT prompts and the privacy manifest in line with April 2026 Apple guidance.
Wire IAP receipt validation to a new endpoint on api.dolice.asia.
Add an offline UI fallback (the generated code assumed always-online).
Of these six steps, only #1 and #5 felt cleanly delegable to Claude Code. The rest reused infrastructure I built across the wallpaper-app portfolio. Rork's strength is the speed of the first draft. Getting from there to production still rewards prior human experience.
The three decisions that closed the gap to break-even
The three judgments that made May land in the black:
No paid acquisition: kept CAC at zero, grew through ASO and organic only.
Rewarded ads as an alternative Pro path: rather than pushing every light user toward subscription, the rewarded path actually boosted AdMob eCPM.
No RevenueCat: skipped the fixed monthly fee that quietly compresses margins at small scale.
These judgments lean heavily on more than ten years of running wallpaper apps. A first-time indie developer would have a hard time arriving at them up front, so my recommendation is to try one app with a 100-yen subscription as a deliberate trial run.
What I am trying next
In June I am wiring up an in-app notification flow that links directly into AdMob's rewarded activation. Right now a tap on a notification does not lead straight into a rewarded view, and I have a hypothesis that closing that loop bumps eCPM by roughly 1.5x.
Reaching break-even on a 100 yen subscription is not a headline number in absolute terms. But for indie developers using generation-style tooling like Rork, building the break-even instinct at this scale makes the next, larger app much faster to think through. I hope this helps you frame your own.
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