How Do Free Apps Make Money?

We are spoiled when it comes to the number of apps we have at our disposal. We have 3B+ apps in the Play Store and 1B+ in the App Store. The best thing is, most of these apps are free. Have you ever stopped to wonder, why are these apps free, and how does the company even make money?

Ads

The first and most profitable way for a free app to make money is you give you ads. Everyone knows this, but what you might not know is that there are multiple ways for a company to make a profit off of ads.

• The first and most direct way is just force-feeding them.

When you see those 10-second full-screen ads, a company is making money from it. The more they show, the more they earn.

• The second way is from selling your information to ad companies so they can give you personalized ads.

Whenever you clicked the “Agree to TOS” button. More often than not, you’re agreeing to give your information to the ad companies. So the app doesn’t force-feed you any ads, you can be rest assured to know that your information is being sold to ad companies. Jokes aside, you should probably check the TOS before using an app if you are sensitive about this. You don’t have to read through the entire thing, they will have sections for you to look at.

Charging the User of the App Directly

Many apps with fewer ads will instead force-feed you their one-time purchase premium or their monthly subscription like Spotify Premium and other stuff like that. This way, your privacy is protected from shady ad companies. but this will cost you a monthly payment.

A lot of people prefer paying for the app because they are rather sensitive about their information being sold. If you go here, you can see how much Google knows about you. It’s fascinating but also extremely scary to see that Google knows more about you than you know about yourself. So if you’re one of those people who are rather sensitive about your personal information then you might want to turn “personalized ads” off and go for a monthly subscription instead.

Of course, if you’re playing a game then there would probably be some sort of monthly pass and some in-game purchases as well.

Google Play Store

Many people don’t know this but whenever you get a number of downloads from the google play store, you will get a small amount of money for it. Although you will never get enough money this way to sustain a business, it’s still profit nonetheless.