Since GainFrame launched on March 8, I've spent $9,365 trying to get people to download it. Last week I finally put every dollar of that into one database, next to every App Store download, every RevenueCat subscription and every post I've written about the app.
I did it because I kept making calls off whichever dashboard I happened to open that night. Apple Ads would say one thing, TikTok another, and RevenueCat didn't know where anyone came from. 382 of my 528 first purchases since July have no source at all. So I stopped trying to attribute users to channels and looked at timing instead. What happened to downloads when I turned something on, what happened when I turned it off, and which App Store source moved (search, web, or another app).
It's a small app. Most days get 20 to 60 downloads and somewhere between 0 and 10 new paid subscriptions, so one good day can be noise. I only called something a win or a miss when the change was big, repeated, or stopped the day the spend stopped.
Everything I tried, ranked
| Effort | Cost | What happened to downloads | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free web tools, SEO and this blog | $0 in ads | Downloads from my site went from 124 a month (May) to about 350 a month (Sep–Oct) | Worked, then flattened |
| Posting my own progress photos in lifting subreddits | $0 | 74 downloads the day of the September batch (normal was 46), and my best 3 days ever for new paid subscribers | Worked |
| Apple Ads Basic ($100 a month) | $691 | Search downloads fell 30% when it ran out of budget in October | Downloads yes, about break-even |
| Meta ads | $1,142 | Installs from other apps went from 34 a week to 107–142 while it ran | Downloads yes, paying users no |
| Apple Search Ads Advanced | $2,498 | 57 downloads a day vs 17 before, gone the day after I paused | Worked, lost money |
| Reddit Ads | $1,295 | About 50 extra downloads over a week | Didn't work |
| TikTok Ads and Promote boosts | $2,278 | 6,500 clicks, 13 installs reported, no change I could see | Didn't work |
| Paying TikTok clippers | $762 | 1.13M views, downloads flat | Didn't work |
| My own TikTok accounts | $0 | 250 posts, 886K plays, no change after the big ones | Didn't work for downloads |
| A UGC creator (5 videos) | $500 | His posts did nothing visible. His video as a Meta ad got my two best download days | Unclear |
| Posting on X | $0 | No change on any post day | Didn't work for downloads |
| A cash-drop sponsorship and a $49 promo video | $199 | Nothing I could measure | Didn't work |
Apple Search Ads bought downloads I had to keep paying for
From March 13 to May 14 I ran an Apple Search Ads Advanced campaign on discovery keywords. It cost $2,498 and Apple says it got 443 installs, about $5.64 each.
The cleanest window is May 9 to 14. TikTok ads had already stopped, Apple was spending about $153 a day, and the app got 57 downloads a day. The week before I started it was 17 a day. I paused it on May 14 and the next day was 33, then 19, and by May 21 it was 10. Nothing stuck around.
The users also paid less. People who installed during that burst made me $1.09 each in their first 30 days. People who installed before it made $1.50. Paid subscriptions went up by about 0.8 a day while it ran, so each extra paying user cost me about $190. I make about $22 to $24 per paying user in their first 30 days, so the math was never close.
TikTok and Reddit ads didn't move anything I could see
I spent $1,038 on TikTok ads in one week in May (May 2 to 8). TikTok reported 6,500 clicks and 13 installs. Apple Search Ads was running at the same time, so I checked the days right after TikTok stopped: downloads went up, from 51 a day to 57. Whatever TikTok was doing, it wasn't showing up in the App Store.
Reddit Ads in late March was $1,295 for 1,701 clicks. Downloads went from about 13 a day to about 24 for that week. That's roughly 50 extra downloads, or $20 to $30 each, and paid subscriptions didn't change.
Meta got cheap downloads and almost no paying users
Meta ran on and off from July 20 to October 17 for $1,142 across seven campaigns. App Store downloads that come from another app (that's where Instagram and Facebook installs land) went from 34 a week to 142 the week of my first real test, and 111 and 107 during the last campaign. When Meta stopped they dropped right back to 34. That's about 470 extra downloads for around $2.50 to $3 each, which is the best cost per download of anything I paid for.
They just didn't pay. My two best download days ever, August 14 and 15 (83 and 98), were a Meta test using my UGC creator's video. Those two days produced 10 paid subscriptions. RevenueCat tags exactly one paying user to Facebook. And my 7-day conversion fell from 7.6% to around 5.5% during the last Meta campaign.
In July I also ran a $44 "Sales" campaign for three days. It got 3,218 clicks and App Store page views jumped to about 2,000 a day. Downloads didn't move at all. I'd been wondering what that spike was for months.
1.1 million clipping views and flat downloads
In September I started paying TikTok clippers through Content Rewards. 183 creators posted 1,489 clips and got 1.13 million views for $762, about $0.67 per thousand views. I'd put in $1,000 and $238 is still sitting there.
Weekly views went from 13,000 to 371,000. Weekly downloads didn't go up with them. Installs from other apps (where TikTok bio links land) stayed at 34 to 44 a week in the weeks when clipping was the only thing running, the same as before I'd spent anything. On November 5 the clips got 105,000 views and the app got 6 downloads from other apps.
My own TikTok accounts tell the same story. 250 posts and 886,000 plays. My biggest post did 129,000 plays and downloads in the three days after it were lower than the three days before.
The $100 a month campaign I'd forgotten about
Since April 19 I've had an Apple Ads Basic campaign running on about $100 a month. I mostly forgot about it. It turns out it's the only paid thing with a clean on/off signal.
Starting in October it began spending the whole month's budget in about a week. It ran out on October 12 and went dark until November 2. Search downloads were 24.6 a day while it was on and 17.1 a day for the 20 days it was off. When it came back in November they went back to 24. That's roughly $2.50 to $3 per extra download.
Cheap downloads are not the same as paying back, though. Since August it spent $387, and the payers RevenueCat tags to Apple Ads paid $443, about $376 after Apple's cut. So it roughly breaks even. Since October, when my tagging is close to complete, it's 2 payers for $200. I'm not raising the budget until that number gets better.
The November restart lined up with a keyword change I shipped in the same release, so I trust the October drop more than the recovery. Either way, part of the search decline I was blaming on keyword rank was this campaign sitting idle. The fix is to set it so it spends evenly across the month.
My own progress photos
On September 4 I posted my own progress photos in five lifting subreddits on the same day (r/WeightTraining, r/Brogress and a few smaller ones). They weren't ads and most of them didn't mention the app. The app got 74 downloads that day, against about 46 normally, and 24 new paid subscriptions over the next three days. That's my best three-day stretch ever, by a small margin (the next best is 22), on a day I spent $2.
It wasn't a one-off. On March 19 a similar post in r/WorkoutRoutines took a 13-a-day app to 30 and 23. That's also how I found my first 100 beta testers, people asking what app I'd used.
Two good examples isn't a law. But it's the only free thing I've done that lined up with a jump in paying users, and I've only done it a handful of times.
The website is the only thing that grew and stayed
Downloads that come from my website went from 124 a month in May to 404 in August and have held around 350 a month since. No ads. That's the free tools, SEO, and these posts.
It's also stopped growing. Site visitors went up 4.7x from July to October. Clicks from the site to the App Store went up 2.6x from August to October. Downloads from the site went down a little over the same months. Most of the new traffic is people using the body visualizer and leaving, and I haven't figured out how to give them a reason to install.
What I'm changing
- Fix the Apple Ads Basic pacing so it runs all month.
- Post my own progress photos in lifting subreddits on a schedule instead of when I remember.
- Let the clipping balance run out and not top it up.
- Work on why site visitors don't install before I chase more site visitors.
Paid ads have cost me $7,904 so far. The ones that worked bought downloads that stopped the day I stopped paying, and most of those people didn't subscribe. The website took months and it's still sending people every day. My best three days came from a photo of myself I'd have posted anyway.
If you've tested paid channels for a small subscription app, did any of them pay back for you? And if you've had web traffic grow without installs following, I'd like to hear what fixed it.