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A solo dev built a digital wardrobe app for his wife; it made $8,354 in 2025 while his two other apps made $472 combined — the honest arithmetic of shipping small apps.
Clausy $8,354 (peak ~$933 MRR, ended year ~$870) · Quickpack $343 · Tennis Notebook $129 · $12,000 lifetime across two years
"If an app exists in a space, that just means there's a market for it. You don't have to reinvent the wheel — just build a better version, a simpler version, a more minimalistic version."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Raine makes minimalist mobile apps and posts an annual revenue recap. In 2024 he made $3,200, all of it from Clausy, his digital closet app. He set 2025 goals of $2,000 MRR, at least two new products, and a serious marketing push. He hit one of those three. Total 2025 revenue across all products was $8,828: Clausy $8,354, Quickpack $343, Tennis Notebook $129. Clausy roughly doubled year over year — he started January around $400 MRR, peaked near $933 in September or October, and finished the year around $870. Across two years his apps have made about $12,000. He is blunt that this is neither quit-your-job money nor life-changing money, and blunt about why: 'I am terrible at marketing. Like genuinely bad at it.' He can build, design, and ship; he cannot reliably get people to find out the thing exists. What makes this worth an entry in a directory of proven businesses is precisely that honesty. It is a clean, unhyped control group for every $10K/month app story: a competent solo developer with three shipped products, real daily active users, and roughly $870 a month at the end of year two. Our read: the interesting number is not $8,828, it is the ratio — one product produced 95% of revenue, and the other two produced almost nothing despite being, by his own account, decent apps.
The first user of Clausy was his wife — Raine built the digital closet app for her, and it is now used by people all over the world. Everything after that arrived through App Store search, because nothing else was running.
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Data credibility: Self-reported annual recap by a solo indie developer on his own YouTube channel. All revenue figures — $8,828 total, Clausy $8,354, Quickpack $343, Tennis Notebook $129, MRR moving from ~$400 to a ~$933 peak to ~$870, and $12,000 lifetime across two years — come from the creator stating them on camera. No dashboards were shown in the transcript and none of it is independently verified. Marketing costs are described qualitatively ('a couple hundred' on Noise, 'way more than I got back' on UGC creators) rather than itemised. He is unusually candid about failures, which raises rather than lowers our confidence, but these remain unaudited founder numbers at small scale.
Two years ago none of these apps had earned a dollar. The first real revenue came through Clausy, which finished 2024 at $3,200 and was the only product of his making any money at that point, sold as a subscription.
Only one of the three apps began compounding, and it did so on retention rather than reach. Clausy went from $3,200 in 2024 to $8,354 in 2025, with MRR moving from roughly $400 in January to a peak near $933 in September or October and closing the year around $870.
The flat stretch here is an entire year measured against a goal he missed: $2,000 MRR set for 2025, roughly $870 reached. His own diagnosis is not that the apps are weak — "I can build an app.
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