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War of apptrition

Data shows most new apps don’t just fail — they completely bomb

A new report shows that more than 80% of apps never reach $1,000 in monthly revenue in the first two years after launching.

Millie Giles

3/19/25 5:57AM

These days, you can’t do anything without signing up for something — with everything from (naturally) streaming services, to news sites, to chatbots, to airlines, to pet suppliers now operating on subscription models.

Luckily for Apple and Google, which take a cut of in-app payments through their respective app stores, many of those subscriptions now start through our phones.

But in the increasingly competitive battle for space on our precious home screens, most apps never even come close to getting enough subscribers to cover their costs.

According to the 2025 State Of Subscription Apps report from RevenueCat, published last week, just a handful of apps now dominate a huge share of users’ screen time. According to the research, the top 5% of newly launched apps make over 400x more in their first two years (~$8,888) than the bottom 25% (~$19).

The report also outlined that only 19% of new apps across all categories generated $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue within two years of launch, implying that 81% failed to hit that threshold. After this, the drop-off is steep, with a large portion of apps failing to meet each consecutive monetary milestone. At the upper end, only 5% of all new apps reached $10,000 in revenue.

Mobile apps subscription models — Sherwood News

Clearly, subscriptions alone are no longer enough for many newly launched apps to survive on. Now, hybrid monetization structures are becoming more common, with 35% of apps overall mixing subscriptions with consumable or lifetime purchases — including ~62% of Gaming apps and ~40% of Social & Lifestyle apps — to fuel revenue growth from both new and loyal app users.

App-eat-app world

Different types of apps also have very different subscription strategies. Health & Fitness apps were uniquely focused on yearly plans, with 66.6% of app subscriptions sold on an annual basis. Clearly, developers in the health arena are hoping that users have enough motivation to instill good habits to commit to an entire year. Gaming apps were the opposite: just 5.7% of subscriptions sold were for an annual plan, while weekly plans dominated, comprising 78% of subscriptions sold in the category.

Overall, of the categories surveyed, Photo & Video apps were the most successful in generating revenue, with ~28% of these newly released apps reaching $1,000 and ~9% reaching $10,000 in their first two years.

$290K

Rani Molla9m

Tesla has been quoting the price of its long-awaited long-range Semi truck at $290,000, Electrek reports. The $290,000 price point represents a significant increase from the original $180,000, roughly 60% higher. However, it’s still well below the industry average for Class 8 electric semi trucks. California Air Resources Board data shows that the average cost of a zero-emission Class 8 truck was $435,000 in 2024, meaning Tesla is undercutting competitors by about $145,000.

On its last earnings call, Tesla said it would start production on the “designed for autonomy” electric commercial truck this year.

Jon Keegan1h

Report: OpenAI shuttering 4o model due to sycophancy that was hard to control

This week, OpenAI plans to permanently remove its 4o model from ChatGPT.

The model has developed an unusually devoted group of users. But it also has been criticized for being overly sycophantic and allegedly may have led to a series of dangerous outcomes for its users, including suicide, murder, and mental health crises.

The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s decision to shutter 4o stems from the fact that the company was not able to successfully mitigate these potentially dangerous outcomes, and wanted to move users to safer models. Thirteen lawsuits against OpenAI alleging harm from the use of ChatGPT have been consolidated into one case by a California judge, according to the report. At least some of them are tied to users of the 4o model.

The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.

Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.

The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.

Inside OpenAI’s Decision to Kill the AI Model That People Loved Too Much

The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.

Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.

The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.

Rani Molla2h

Morgan Stanley says solar manufacturing could add as much as $50 billion in value to Tesla

Tesla’s recently reported move into solar manufacturing could add $25 billion to $50 billion in value to the company’s energy business, Morgan Stanley writes.

The bank currently values the energy business at $140 billion, so an increase of as much as $50 billion isn’t anything to sneeze at, though it’s also a drop in the bucket of Tesla’s gargantuan $1.3 trillion market cap, or the $1 trillion opportunity Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks is packed into Tesla’s AI and autonomy efforts.

Reporting on Tesla’s solar ambitions knocked First Solar shares lower last week. But Morgan Stanley writes that Tesla is unlikely to compete directly with the country’s leading photovoltaic panel maker, instead pairing it with its fast-growing energy business and using much of that production internally. Rather than adding solar panels to an already glutted global market, Tesla could use them internally to avoid supply chain bottlenecks and meet its own growing power demands.

The bank expects Tesla to vertically integrate its solar capacity to meet data center demand, including for data centers in space. (As we’ve noted, the mission of Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been seeming very similar to Tesla’s these days.)

“We believe the decision to allocate capital to adding solar capacity may be justified by the value creation and growth opportunities that having a vertically integrated solar + energy storage business can yield,” the Morgan Stanley note reads.

Notably, Morgan Stanley estimates the solar panel endeavor will cost Tesla $30 billion to $70 billion — a sum that Tesla didn’t include as part of its doubled $20 billion-plus capex plan this year.

Rani Molla

Hey Big Spender

How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets

It’s mostly, but not all, for AI.

Rani Molla22h

OpenAI is now officially showing ads

Just a day after Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad aired, making fun of the concept of ad-backed AI chatbots, OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT for its free and Go subscription tiers.

In a blog post, OpenAI reiterated that ads wouldn’t affect ChatGPT’s responses and would be “clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer.”

“Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks,” the company wrote. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right.”

Advertising is one way the company, which is expected to go public late this year, could offset the massive cost of running its service.

The Information previously reported that OpenAI aiming for ad spending commitments of less than $1 million per advertiser during the testing phase — far cheaper than a Super Bowl prime-time spot like Anthropic’s.

Testing ads in ChatGPT