How To Monetize An Android and iOS App To Help Manage And Relieve Stress

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I recently chatted with a mobile app entrepreneur, who is also a professional psychologist. She used her background in psychology, specifically stress management, to make a very promising mobile app to help people deal with stress and relieve stress. If you are reading this blog, you are probably an entrepreneur, and are all too familiar with stress. So this may be a very useful app for you. Here is the home page for the stress relief and management app. For iPhone users, here is the iOS stress management app. And for Android users, here is the link to the Android stress management app.

How To Monetize This App

There are a few very interesting nuances of this particular app that open up a number of possibilities for how to make money from this app.

Since people have stress on a very consistent basis, and stress never quite goes away, people who will find this app useful for managing stress would use the app regularly. Since the app would be a “regular and consistent use app” instead of an app that you use a few times to fulfill some utility and quit, it puts this particular app in a good position to retain long-term users, which in turn creates the potential for a subscription based revenue model.

In apps, subscription revenue models are some of the best ways to monetize an app via in-app purchases because instead of charging $0.99 once, you can charge that fee monthly for years to come, which means that over time, the revenue from a single user can possibly be as high as 50 or 100 times greater than if there was just the single purchase.

Note, Apple makes it difficult to add a subscription in-app purchase. They impose a number of requirements which makes most apps ineligible. So this strategy would possibly have to be augmented for the iPhone version of this app where you may sell the premium features for a 1-time fee that is priced high enough to make financial sense for you while being still affordable enough to not irritate the users too much.

Another possibility, for this particular entrepreneur is to use the app for selling her other products. She has books and other products that also helps people manage stress. Part of the problem with up-selling other products from an app is that mobile app users are used to price points of free or at most just a few dollars. So selling them products for $10 or more dollars is a challenge. Another part of the problem is that many mobile app users are in third world countries, and do not have mobile banking. That means that they can’t buy products even if they want to. For example, despite having users across the world, over 50% of the revenue for my apps comes from only four countries: United States, England, Australia, and Canada. Lastly, the other challenge with selling things to mobile app users is that it is more difficult to go through the full purchase process on the phone rather than on a laptop. Typing is more difficult, the screen is smaller, there are many mis-taps, and the overall process is just more clunky than doing the same process from a laptop which has a nicer screen and a more convenient keyboard.

The Problem With Paid Apps

As a business owner, I love selling paid products. The problem is that in almost any ecosystem, paid products can’t compete with similar products that are free.

The app stores are especially designed to give an advantage to free apps. Free apps tend to rank much higher in app store search, and just can’t compete with free apps, especially in niches that are competitive.

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