My Workout App Made £1,287 in Its First Year. Here Is Every Number.
Between 1 August 2025 and 27 August 2026, Gym Note Plus took £1,287.27 in gross revenue across 194 transactions. After Apple's commission and tax, £851.69 of that actually reached me.
In the same window, 5,042 people opened the app for the first time. Fifty of them are paying subscribers today.
Plenty of indie developers post their revenue. Almost nobody posts the denominator next to it. Every number below was pulled on 27 August 2026 from RevenueCat, PostHog, Google Search Console and the git log, and I have said where each one came from.
The First Four Months Made £9.17
RevenueCat saw three customers in August 2025, twelve in September, fifty-five in October. The first tagged release in the app repo is v1.0.2, dated 20 November 2025.
The first payment landed that same month: one transaction, £4.99. December added exactly one more, £4.18.
Two paying customers in four months. The app had taken £9.17 and I had pushed 90 commits since the end of August.
December Sent 1,202 People and Two of Them Paid
New app users per month, August 2025 to August 2026
View the data
| Group | Aug 25 | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan 26 | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| People who opened the app for the first time | 3 | 12 | 55 | 160 | 1202 | 1055 | 402 | 495 | 433 | 322 | 241 | 340 | 322 |
December 2025 was the biggest month the app has ever had: 1,202 people opened it for the first time, then 1,055 more in January. New Year fitness resolutions are real, and they all arrive in the same fortnight.
Of those 1,202 December arrivals, two paid within seven days. That is 0.17%.
February collapsed to 402 new users and it has drifted down since: 322 in May, 241 in June, 340 in July, 322 so far in August. I have never had another December.
For most of this year I read that as the story. Downloads down 80% from the peak, therefore the business is going backwards.
That turned out to be wrong.
The Number That Actually Moved
Share of new users who paid within 7 days, by the month they arrived
View the data
| Group | Nov 25 | Dec | Jan 26 | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paid within 7 days | 0.62% | 0.17% | 1.8% | 0.75% | 0.81% | 0.92% | 2.17% | 2.9% | 3.82% | 4.04% |
The December cohort converted at 0.17%. The July cohort converted at 3.82%, from 13 payers out of 340 arrivals. That is 22 times better on a quarter of the traffic.
Across all 5,042 people who have ever opened the app, 73 paid within seven days. The lifetime conversion rate is 1.45%, and the only reason it is that high is the last four months.
Monthly recurring revenue followed. It sat at £4.99 in November 2025, £80.41 in January after the resolution crowd bought in, then £75.54 in April, £100.51 in June, £110.78 in July and £137.87 on 27 August. Active subscriptions went 23, 29, 32, 41, 50 over the same five months.
Gross revenue by month, in pounds
View the data
| Group | Nov 25 | Dec | Jan 26 | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue | 4.99 | 4.18 | 330 | 85.52 | 245 | 163 | 82.84 | 101 | 81.88 | 188 |
Revenue is lumpy because annual plans hit in one go. Transactions are the smoother line: 15 in February, 22 in March, 17 in April, 22 in May, 23 in June, 32 in July, 37 in August with four days still to run.
Of the 50 people subscribed right now, 36 are on monthly and 14 are on annual. Twenty-seven are in the United States, six in the UK, four in Australia, two each in Mexico and Canada, and one each in Türkiye, Czechia, Spain, Finland and Greece.
What Changed in Those Four Months
I shipped 452 commits to the app and 221 to the website over the year, across 54 tagged releases. Four of those changes are the plausible causes.
The onboarding got a demo instead of a pitch. On 3 April I moved the note-translation demo into the second onboarding screen, so a new user pastes their own workout text and watches it turn into a logged session before being asked for anything. On 19 July the whole onboarding and dashboard got reworked again.
The paywall started reporting honestly. Until late July the purchase event fired unreliably because of a seven-second timeout, so I had no paywall data at all. Since 27 July PostHog has recorded 150 dismissals, 7 purchases and 4 restores. That is 4.46% of paywall decisions ending in a payment, which lines up with the RevenueCat cohort numbers.
The prices were broken almost everywhere. On 1 August I audited all 175 App Store territories and found that in 118 of them the annual plan cost more than twelve months of the monthly plan. France was €59.99 a year against €2.99 a month. Nepal was five times worse. The "discount for committing" was a penalty in two thirds of the world. I applied 24 monthly and 131 annual price corrections in one pass.
The discount moved to the plan I want people on. On 14 August the 50%-off introductory offer came off Monthly and went onto Annual in all 175 territories. It had been subsidising the exact choice I was trying to steer people away from.
There has never been a free trial. Not one, in the whole year. Every single one of those 194 transactions was somebody paying on the spot.
The Blog Went Up 51x and Downloads Did Not
The other half of the year was content. I published 82 blog posts in July and 121 in August, on top of the ten that existed before.
Google search impressions per month for gymnoteplus.com
View the data
| Group | Oct 25 | Nov | Dec | Jan 26 | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 0 | 64 | 210 | 959 | 990 | 1410 | 1933 | 1599 | 1696 | 18845 | 86991 |
June finished on 1,696 impressions and 53 clicks. August is on 86,991 impressions and 688 clicks with four days to go. Impressions are up 51 times over in two months.
New app users in those same three months: 241, 340, 322.
So the traffic is real and the installs are not there yet. Either the gap between reading a workout-split article and downloading a logging app is longer than eight weeks, or those readers were never going to install anything. I do not know which, and I am not going to pretend the chart above is a growth win until it shows up in the first chart.
What This Doesn't Prove
The samples are tiny. Fifty subscribers. Seventy-three lifetime payers. Seven paywall purchases in a month. A single unusual week moves any of these percentages by a point.
Four changes shipped inside eight weeks. The onboarding rework, the paywall fix, the 175-territory price correction and the intro-offer move all landed in the same window the conversion rate climbed. I cannot separate them, and anyone telling you they could from this data is guessing.
Falling traffic flatters conversion. When 1,202 people arrive in a January rush, most of them are browsing. When 241 arrive in a quiet June, more of them came looking for something specific. Part of the climb from 0.17% to 3.82% is the audience changing, not the product improving, and I have no way to size that part.
The paywall history does not exist. The purchase event was broken until 27 July 2026, so there is no before to compare the 4.46% against. It is a baseline, not a result.
A year of App Store data is missing from this post. Impressions, product page views and install conversion live in App Store Connect, which I could not pull programmatically. Every "new user" figure here is a RevenueCat first-seen customer, meaning somebody who installed and opened the app, not somebody who saw the listing.
One month is not a trend. August is the best month for MRR, transactions and conversion. It is also incomplete, and it follows a January that looked great and then gave most of it back.
What I Am Doing Next
Two things I can be held to. Get the annual share above 14 of 50 by the end of October, and work out whether blog readers install anything. The first needs the intro-offer move to do its job; the second needs a real attribution path between the site and the App Store listing, which I do not currently have. I will report both against these exact numbers.
Gym Note Plus is a workout tracker for people who already log their training in their phone's notes app or a paper notebook and find full-featured gym apps too slow to use between sets. You type bench 100 - 8,8,6, it logs the session, and the graphs, PRs and history build themselves. You can try the same idea in the browser with the free notes to workout translator before installing anything, or check a set against the one rep max calculator. The app is free on the App Store with a Pro upgrade at $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year.
Downloads fell 80% from the peak and revenue went up. I spent most of the year watching the wrong number.
Final Takeaways
- £1,287.27 gross, £851.69 kept, 194 transactions, 12 months. That is the whole business so far.
- 5,042 people opened the app and 73 paid within a week. A 1.45% lifetime conversion rate, carried almost entirely by the last four months.
- The December rush converted at 0.17% and the July cohort at 3.82%. A quarter of the traffic produced six times the payers.
- 118 of 175 App Store territories had an annual plan that cost more than twelve monthly payments. Check your own price ladder before you buy another install.
- 51x more search impressions produced no measurable lift in installs yet. Content is a slow channel, and I am refusing to call it a win early.
- If you log workouts in a notes app or you are picking between the big trackers, pick on how fast it is to use mid-set. That is what decides whether you keep logging six months from now.
Josh Ibbotson
Josh is the creator of Gym Note Plus, building tools that make workout tracking as simple as taking notes.
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