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Two tiny iOS apps that plug the gaps in someone else's software — open-sourced on GitHub and still selling on the App Store, doing $433 in thirty days from two Reddit posts and one YouTube video.
$671 in sales in the last 7 days · $1,000+ cumulative over roughly two months
He open-sourced the app and it kept selling. "It's still making hundreds of dollars a month, even though people can use it themselves. And that I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm happy."
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This is a small business documented honestly, which is rarer and more useful than a large one documented loosely. The developer walks his App Store Connect dashboard on camera and reads the real figures: $671 in sales over the last seven days, proceeds up 65% over the last month, and "over the last 30 days, I made $433." Cumulatively, "a little over two months I've made $1,000." The apps came out of his own irritation. He uses Obsidian, the note-taking app, and wanted his Apple Health data inside it. Nothing existed, so he built HealthMD. Separately, he was paying for Obsidian's own sync service and disliked it — it restricted him to a single vault and unlimited cost $20-30. His reasoning for building his own is the thesis of the whole portfolio: "As we have AI now, it's hard to justify subscriptions when I can just build it myself." That became SyncMD. He has five apps live — SyncMD, HealthMD, Insta Reply, Voxboard, and I'm Ghost — but only the first two produce meaningful income. HealthMD is doing about $300 a month; SyncMD, launched more recently, about $160-170. The numbers are small. That is the point of including it. This is what the first rung of an indie app business actually looks like, with the marketing that produced it named precisely enough to copy.
HealthMD's entire marketing history is two Reddit posts in r/ObsidianMD, and both show up as spikes on the revenue graph. The first was not a launch.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. The exact words are quoted below, with a timestamp that jumps to the second each figure is said.
“Um, and all over the last 30 days, I made $433. Um, so that's actually amazing.”
2:09 · hear it in the video“So a little over two months I've made $1,000. So feeling really good about that.”
8:34 · hear it in the videoData credibility: The strongest evidence in this batch relative to its size: the developer opens App Store Connect on camera and reads the actual figures — $671 in sales over seven days, proceeds up 65% over the last month, $433 over the last 30 days, HealthMD at roughly $300 this month against $240 last month, SyncMD at roughly $160-170, and $1,000+ cumulative over about two months. He also shows the revenue graph and points at the specific spikes caused by each Reddit post, which corroborates the acquisition story rather than just asserting it. Caveats: it is his own dashboard rather than third-party data; he does not distinguish consistently between 'sales' (gross) and 'proceeds' (after Apple's 15%), so the $671 and $433 figures are not directly comparable; and the sample is two months on a rising curve, which is the easiest period in any app's life to present well. The apps, GitHub repositories, and Reddit posts are all publicly checkable. No conflict of interest is apparent — he is not selling a course or community.
Five dollars, one time, for an app whose source code was already public on GitHub. That is the fact worth sitting with: anyone could clone the repository and build HealthMD themselves, almost nobody did, and what buyers paid for was App Store convenience, automatic updates, and never opening Xcode.
The loop here is comment-driven. The first comment on his launch post asked whether HealthMD ran on Mac, so he built a Mac companion — which needed its own design, because macOS cannot read health data at all and the iPhone had to remain the source.
Insta Reply shipped in November and, in his words, nobody has paid for it since. Real revenue does not begin on his graph until 4 February, which puts the quiet stretch at roughly three months of live apps earning nothing.
Both apps are companion utilities for someone else's ecosystem. Neither tries to be a platform. HealthMD exports Apple Health data into Obsidian as files you own. The hard part turned out to be scheduling: he wanted it to run automatically every morning at 8am, and Apple locks health data behind an unlocked device, so background scheduling is impossible. His workaround is a notification that, when tapped, runs the export. He spent a month on that problem before shipping the compromise. There is also a Mac companion, built because the very first comment on his launch post asked whether it ran on Mac — the Mac cannot access health data at all, so the iPhone remains the source and the Mac app exists purely to receive the files. SyncMD syncs Obsidian vaults to iPhone without the single-vault restriction of the official service. A naming detail worth remembering: he originally shipped HealthMD under a name containing "Obsidian", learned from the second comment on his own launch post that Obsidian is a trademark, and renamed it. That is a five-minute check that saves a rebrand. Both apps are open source on GitHub, with issue tracking and pull requests from users, and the apps can generate an issue report from inside the app.
He changed the model mid-flight and the transcript captures both sides of it. Originally both apps were a $5 one-time purchase. He converted them to freemium: free up to a point, then a hard paywall for continued or premium use, and he doubled the price to $10 while doing it. His reasoning was refreshingly unscientific: "Everyone says you're probably charging too little, so I just doubled it." The result, as read off the dashboard, is proceeds up 65% month over month. HealthMD went from $240 the previous month to roughly $300 (composed of a $194 line and a $99 line of in-app purchases). SyncMD, newer, contributed about $160-170. He is on Apple's Small Business Program, so Apple takes 15% rather than 30% until he passes a million dollars in revenue — an easy thing for solo developers to leave on the table by not enrolling. The genuinely interesting economic fact is that both apps are open source and still sell. Anyone can clone the repository and build it themselves; almost nobody does. What people are buying is the App Store convenience, automatic updates, and not having to touch Xcode. Our read: open-sourcing removed the trust objection for an app that reads your health data, and cost him almost nothing in revenue. That trade is available to any developer building a privacy-sensitive utility, and hardly anyone takes it.
The entire marketing history of HealthMD is two Reddit posts in the r/ObsidianMD community, and he shows the traffic spikes they produced on the revenue graph. The first post was not a launch. It was a build-in-public post before the app existed: he described what he had made for himself and asked whether anyone was interested. People asked for the link. Because App Store approval was going to take a while, he open-sourced it on the spot — "it's your health data. I don't care. I don't want you to feel like I'm doing anything nefarious with it." The actual release came a full month later, and produced the second spike. His third attempt, announcing the Mac update, was removed by moderators. He believes it was because he included Gumroad links. His response was to stop posting rather than risk a ban: "I don't really want to get banned from that subreddit." He is saving his next post for the Android launch. SyncMD's distribution is entirely different and entirely one video. He posted a YouTube video on March 20 about syncing Obsidian on iPhone. It has about 2,000 views and is his most popular video, arriving on a steady rather than spiky curve. "YouTube search is actually the big one. Supposedly, a lot of people are looking into how to sync on their iPhone." Two thousand views. That is the whole channel for that app. Our read: for a utility that solves a specific, searched-for problem, a single video that ranks in search beats any amount of social posting, because the traffic renews itself.
Built with Claude Code. Native iOS plus a Mac companion, with an Android version in progress. Distribution through the App Store; open source hosted on GitHub, which also serves as the issue tracker and receives community pull requests. Costs are effectively the $99/year Apple developer account, an LLM subscription, and Apple's 15% cut under the Small Business Program. There is no server bill mentioned — the apps move the user's own data between the user's own devices, which is why they cost nothing to run. The current experiment is paid-free distribution rather than paid acquisition. His partner produces UGC content for TikTok, posting about three times a day at roughly 800-1,000 views a day. The account started around 600 views per post, got what he describes as a temporary shadowban that dropped it to four or five views, paused, and recovered to around 200. They have iterated the format: first hooks over app screenshots, then AI-generated visualisations built from his own health data (one example he shows is a "blood oxygen river"), and now a mix of hooks plus visualisations. The second experiment is more interesting: building free, genuinely useful Obsidian community plugins that surface his health visualisations inside users' own dashboards. The plugin is the marketing. "I want to get onto the Obsidian subreddit more. But I don't want to just be like pushing my product. So, I'm trying to push these open-source kind of community plugins that I do believe will bring value to users, but also get more eyes on Health MD."
Copy the target selection. Pick a piece of software with a devoted community and an obvious gap — Obsidian, Notion, Home Assistant, Blender, Anki, Logseq, Raycast — and build the small utility the community keeps asking for. The market is pre-assembled, it has a forum, and the users are technical enough to articulate what they want. Copy the pre-launch post. Post what you built for yourself before it exists as a product, and ask if anyone wants it. You get demand validation, a feature list, and your first users, at zero cost. His entire product roadmap came from comments: the Mac app existed because one person asked. Copy the open-source move for anything privacy-sensitive. It removed the objection to letting an unknown app read health data, and it cost him essentially nothing in sales. Copy the single search-intent video. One video answering a question people type into YouTube outperformed months of social posting. Change the community strategy so you do not burn your one channel. He is now effectively locked out of the subreddit that made HealthMD work, because a promotional post got removed. Read the rules first, contribute far more than you promote, and build a second channel before you need it. Change the scale ambition honestly. Five apps, two earning, $433 a month. Our read: this is a real and repeatable first rung, not a business you can quit a job for — and the path from here is more apps in the same community or one app that goes deeper, not a marketing miracle on these two.
Platform dependency is total and doubled. The apps exist only because Obsidian exists; if Obsidian ships native health integration or better multi-vault sync, both products evaporate. And SyncMD in particular competes directly with a first-party paid service from the very company whose ecosystem it depends on — that is a precarious place to build. Apple is the second dependency. Health data access rules already forced a design compromise (no background scheduling), and tighter restrictions would break the core feature. Distribution is fragile. HealthMD's growth came from one subreddit, and he has effectively stopped posting there after a removal, leaving him with no active channel for that app. TikTok has already shadowbanned the account once. Neither channel is under his control. The open-source decision, while smart, does cap upside. Any competitor can fork the repository and ship a better-marketed version, and there is no technical moat to prevent it. Finally, honesty about scale. The verified numbers are $433 over thirty days and about $1,000 cumulative in two months, on five shipped apps. The trend is genuinely good — 65% month-over-month growth on proceeds and a chart he describes as beginning an organic upswing — but the absolute figures are small, the sample is two months, and there is no evidence yet that the curve continues.
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