Indie app developer: financial creative freedom

“Do you live off your app?”

I get asked the question often: “Are you making money?” As if independence only counted for something once it showed up as numbers in a bank account.

The honest answer is: no, not yet. It brings something in, but not enough to live on fully. Maybe one day. Maybe never entirely (no, tax office, put that audit away).

And yet I get enormous pleasure out of building these apps for my small independent studio.

The myth of financial freedom

There is a seductive image of the indie developer: a MacBook on a terrace somewhere between Lisbon and Bali, two apps running on their own, passive income landing while he sleeps. The dream.

That dream exists, but it is rare. Very rare.

Most apps never break through. The ones that do take months, sometimes years, before they generate meaningful revenue. And even when it works, margins are tight, the App Store takes its share, so does the taxman, and customer support does not magically disappear.

I am not saying this to discourage anyone, but to underline how dangerous it is to set out with the illusion social media sells. It pushes you to give up too early, to tell yourself after six months “this isn’t working”, when you may simply be measuring the wrong thing.

Real freedom is in the making; the real gain is in the learning

What nobody really explains before you start is that the most exhilarating part of independence is not having no boss — it is having no filter between an idea and its execution: you build what you imagine, and you learn a great deal doing it.

A problem you run into in daily life, a question that keeps coming up in conversation, and a few weeks later an app with your name on it is being used by actual people.

To get there, you sometimes have to learn knowledge and skills you simply did not have before.

CineRank came out of a post-film question, not a market study or a brief. That app exists today because nobody had to approve the idea, nobody asked for a slide deck, and nobody said “let’s look at that next sprint”. My first goal was to make something, not to live off it. If it does take off, mind you, I won’t be complaining.

To build it, I had to learn a language and a way of working that were completely unfamiliar. And believe me, falling into the maze of shipping an iOS app is an education.

That is what freedom is: you do what you want. The direct line between what you imagine, what you learn and what you build — not passive income.

So why is it so hard?

Building alone can be exhausting.

There is no team to bounce off, no manager to confirm you are heading the right way, and no salary at the end of the month — get ready to drink the pasta water. Doubt settles in easily, especially on the evenings when downloads flatline, when an update goes unnoticed, or when you spend three hours on a bug nobody will ever see.

And through all of that, you still need real income, the kind that pays the rent. That may mean keeping a job on the side, freelancing, or juggling several activities at once.

The financial freedom everyone talks about is not necessarily waiting at the end of the first app, or even the tenth. Making it a condition for starting means never starting.

I love what I make, even if others don’t

Making things alone, outside any system, demands an unusual level of honesty. You can no longer hide behind a badly written brief or a group decision. Every choice — from the business model to the design, the name, the price — is personal. And when it does not work, the responsibility is entirely yours.

But when it does work, even on a small scale, even if a single user tells you the app changed their film nights for the better, the satisfaction is unlike anything else. It is different from anything I experienced as an employee.

So should you go for it? Yes, without waiting for the money questions to be settled. Money matters, of course — let’s not be hypocritical. But making it a precondition robs you of the chance to build what you actually want to build.

The best time to start was yesterday. The second best is now, with the idea that keeps coming back to you.

Financial freedom may come one day. Or it may not.

But the freedom to create — once you have had a taste of it, nobody can take that away.