The Top 10% of Apps Grew 306%. Everyone Else? Barely Beat Inflation | SOSA 2026

0:00The top 10% of apps grew 306% and the bottom actually lost money and the median app only grew 5.3%. These markets are just sorting machines and they're going to sort the fittest to the top and the least fit to the bottom. If you were the app that has the model that's the best like you can just get numbers that never were possible before because that just that level of differentiation

0:24was never possible before. But it is interesting that the top 25% of apps grew 80% year-over-year. And it's a bigger market and there's more money. There are more apps making more money than ever. And as concentrated as it is in those top apps growing 300% year-over-year, 25% of apps growing 80% year-over-year. Like there's a lot of growth happening and a lot of apps making a lot of money. Hello, I'm your host David Bernard. With me today, Revenue Cat CEO Jacobing. On the podcast, we discuss what the explosion in new apps means for the market, how the top 10% of apps grew 306% while the median barely beat inflation, and why hard pay walls convert five times better than

1:08premium. Hey, Jacob, it is your favorite time of the year again. I didn't bring I didn't wear my traditional Sosa sweater. Uh uh you know around the house we like to celebrate. You know everybody celebrate in special ways but one of the things I like to do for Sosa is wear a special outfit but I forgot today unfortunately. But it is that time of year again. Number four we think we did. 2023 was the inaugural and uh yeah this is number four. So report is bigger and better than ever. The we

1:39say that every year David. Is that really true? No it really is true. Bigger is objective. Okay. So we can definitely keep adding pages. More pages. [laughter] I'd say better. We we shared some really cool stuff in this year's report that we had never shared before. More breakdowns. Uh we have P90 MP10 for pretty much every single chart, so you kind of see the distribution a little better. I've been through the preprint. The preprint is pretty good. Like I think we've done some some visualization improvements. We have a bigger team working on it now. We also have an army of agents helping us with it this year. Uh which definitely I think should hopefully desopify

2:12ironically the content a little bit. uh and and contractors and whatever. It's a big effort. Bigger effort than ever for sure. And and there's content. We're not making uh there's actual updates. Like the world is changing. There is a state. It's not a permanent state of subscription apps. It's this this year is different than the previous year. I was going to say if there ever was a time to chronicle four years of app store history and numbers, it would have been 2023 to 2026, right? Or I guess three years. It's definitely an interesting time to be looking at the macros. So yeah. Well, that's what I wanted to kick things off with. There will be a founders

2:47letter in in the report. Let's get a preview of like what are your thoughts on the market? And I'll chime in too, but like the state of the app market in 2026 is weird. Uh, see that's a word. the well I think it's like it's hard to talk about apps without kind of zooming out to look at the broader like human macroeconomic condition right now and what's happening because you know as we're talking this is this you know March 2026 the Opus 45 46 and GBT 53 are a couple months old we've had a huge step functioning capabilities in those tools vibe coding has gone from being a sort of

3:28insidery term to like something everybody's doing it's become mainstream. This sounds like some this sounds like a hypothetical story I would make up about the future but it's really happening. It's like every almost everybody's vibe and and you know personally from my experience I've been dabbling in these vibe code tools you know it was cursor in 2024 and then I was playing with maybe like codeex and and stuff and claude code over the summer last year and then you know this this past winter or like December we started to see the the birth of the vibe code platforms like vibe code app and roor and replet and like many others have started to get into mobile um and and get really

4:07good at it is a Yeah. Well, that's the thing. It's like I think, you know, back in the summer when I tried some of these tools, it was like this kind of works, but like you know, for somebody who'd built a lot of apps, I was like, I know I could do this better probably and like this is just kind of a frustrating and expensive experience. In 2025, 20 at the beginning of 2026, it's like I think I'd have a hard time competing with this tool, right? Even if there are some rough edges and the trajectory is really clear. And so that that news kind of got out and so, you know, this

4:35is just talking about the last four months. we've really seen this this explosion and that you know is happening everywhere I think in the economy but I think we've maybe seen it most acutely in in the subscription app landscape like you know revenue cap personally we've seen a I don't [snorts] even know what it is like tripling in the number of apps getting submitted on on an ongoing basis per day and it's continuing to grow this is as of the beginning of March 2026 like it's you know usually we would have these like step function like COVID was a step function or we'd have like a new iOS

5:07release sometimes would bump the like rate of app deployments, but like we've just been seeing this like steady acceleration of app deployments over the last few months and um yeah, I mean it's just it's directly downstream of this technology and like now the question is what does that do? We've been talking the AI story for a couple years right now. Chad TBT's app came out in 2023. They 2024 and five were the ramping years for these consumer AI apps like not just T2T Sunno like anyone you 11 Labs you can think of all these like great consumer AI brands and then all the other like you know long tale of like AI implementing tools those were all now we're

5:45seeing like just the total like flooding of the market with these new apps and I think an it adds some very interesting macroeconomic questions that we don't have the that'll be in the 2027 report I think because in some degree it's going to be a supply and demand question like you know it's obviously apps was constrained on supply for a very long time like it was expensive to make an app it was hard to make an app you had to have a good idea you had to have somebody who could code it you had to have the ability to deploy it all of those costs have I say disappeared but have

6:19gone much much much lower so we've suddenly seen a big supply shock right in a positive way like a big der of apps of like rushing into the stores but that doesn't I mean the demand is necessarily there, right? So it's like it's probably at least for a short period competing over fewer and fewer dollar or not not fewer dollars but like an equal share of dollars and so I think maybe some of this is being bore out in the data a little bit but like you know at least immediately there's going

6:43to be a knife fight over demand on the app store as more and more apps compete over similar users. It does feel like though in 2025 especially the AI apps gave people a reason to open their pocketbooks a little more and like the sensor tower report came out and showed and we talked about this I talked about this with a partner from Madrid and Horwitz in one of the minis episodes that I was actually surprised at the sensor tower report that AI spending on AI generative apps increased like three and a half billion last year but there were a bunch of other categories short video and entertainment and productivity and others where it's like an increase of billions

7:25year-over-year of revenue. So, it it was pretty broad-based and maybe there are more dollars, but it's like there are more dollars across way more apps. Every year you're going to have a baseline. Whatever the GDP is should be your baseline, right? GDP growth is 5%. That should be our our baseline, but the app store has been doing 20 plus. So, it's like there's always been a little bit more. I think it's likely that all of this increased supply will actually inscent demand, right? It'll cause like more money to flow in. It's like, you know, so it's not a fully it's not a fully fixed pie. It's like these things feed back on each other. But I do think

7:57it's like when you have a shock like this where suddenly all these apps appear out of nowhere, the demand is going to take a while to actually come and that is a prediction for the future. But I have a feeling there's going to be these like supply constraints get dropped, supply increases, takes a while for demand. But like I also am very bullish on demand. I mean maybe we're seeing it. We haven't really seen the like AI productivity gains hit consumer spending yet. I don't think we maybe in the most recent jobs at least in the US like not jobs report productivity report we had really strong productivity growth in the US in the last quarter of the year. And so I think

8:30everybody who's working in like knowledge work can see all these tools being applied to like I can suddenly do what used to I used to have to hire a contractor to do or it would take two people to do. We were just talking about podcast prep and like all these things that are just now all this white collar work that's now like automated like that should be I mean aside from the people who aren't getting hired yet anymore like that will sort itself out hopefully but like there'll be a lot of productivity [snorts] leads to surplus right and so that surplus will get redistributed and it's reasonable to think that some of that redistribution will go into essentially luxury

9:02goods which are you know for the most part B toC apps would fall into like a luxury category right things that people don't necessarily strictly need that might take years yet. But I I think it's a reason to be very bullish. Like even if shortterm all this competition pours into the app store and it's bloody and we're fighting and we're doing like competitive ad spend against each other and like is a little ugly for a little while, I think if AI does just like increase the baseline productivity of the world. I think there's a it's reasonable to think that a lot of that excess that surplus will get recaptured in like luxury spending on software on the app stores. At least

9:35that's one bull case, right? the the bare case being open AI becomes all the apps or whatever like there's only three apps in the future and none of us have a job. Uh I think is the extreme bare case. I don't I'm not super worried about that. I think there's actually data in here about outliers and I think that will outliers will continue to be a big thing but I don't think that necessarily means like the middle and longtail are going to disappear. So yeah, another um Andreent partner was actually on the 20 VC podcast and I saw somebody talking about that today on Twitter and their thesis is that most the average person wants to be entertained and waste time, not be

10:13more productive, which is interesting. I mean, why do we we work to spend money on things we like, right? Which is like entertainment, whatever the thing that's driving us. We're a consumer economy, right? Like I you might work in a B2B whatever, but at the end of the day, consumers drive modern capitalist societies, right? And like that's typically it's like having the bigger car and the bigger house and like all these things have driven a ton of economic growth. And I think B2C apps are like a a great thing to soop up that surplus. Yeah, exactly. And then thinking about, you know, all these new apps, they are still competing with YouTube and Tik Tok and just for mind share like

10:53can you get somebody to close the Tik Tok app or or link out from the Tik Tok app to your app and actually spend a few minutes there. That's maybe the limiting factor on this going fully asmtoic, right? Like at some point like you run out of there's no more time and attention in a human's

11:09life, right? to until the AI is doing all the work and then all the free time then goes back to abs. That's that's you go. That's a bull case. It's probably not going to look like, oh, people just work 30 hours now. But it it might be, you know, it's going to happen in subtle ways. I don't know how societyy's going to like adapt and like infuse this stuff. But I do think that there are reasons to believe we're going to have like echoing supply and demand shocks. Like attention being a limited resource is one of them. Just like consumer lag on understanding these things. people just figuring

11:40out, you know, everybody's vibe coding their little pet project app right now, which is cool. And it's like the ideas they already had. I think we're waiting on the next generation of ideas, which is like incorporating these models. They're vibecoded apps. They're I mean, Calai just sold for like a bajillion jillion dollars or whatever if you believe Twitter. And like you know that was an example of a I want to say it was vibe code it was like AI assisted development certainly and AIdriven you know and like there there were certainly a lot of a lot there but like it was a novel application to an old problem with using AI right and I don't think we've necessarily cracked

12:14all of those like revisited every problem we've tried in software and then also like the models are going to continue to improve like their multimodal nature is going to get better like there's so much you know if you just want to look at like the technology of these LLMs Like obviously their base intelligence of the LM is getting better year-over-year, but I think a lot of the advancement we've seen alongside has just been like harness engineering like Claude code and and codecs. Yeah, obviously they're powered by the models, but a lot of what

12:44makes them great is the harness. It's like how do they read files? How do you interact with them? The ecosystem, right? And so that stuff isn't just pour more GPUs on it and make them go burr. Like you have to have engineers, they have to think about stuff. And so I think that same analogy too we need to go through in a lot of apps where it's like yes we have this raw intelligence now yes anybody can grab it off the shelf the hard part is actually like how do I apply this novelty to my problem and that's not just like slap the sparkles on it right don't get me wrong slap the sparkles

13:15on it do that too but I think that's going to take time as people like acclimate to this technology and we're still like early midcycle I mean yeah on that stuff especially every year the models are different right so like you imagine Imag models, just imagine they had instantaneous voice and video interaction, right? That that would change everything, right? Again, as they say on Twitter. So, like there's just so many more advances that can happen within these base models that is going to continue to drive like more opportunities and stuff. So, I I still think we're pretty early. We've talked a lot on this podcast and inside Revenue Cat about the being bullish

13:48on the power of these mini supercomputers in our pocket to improve the human. Now, they're hooked up to actual supercomputers. And yeah, and so like there's so many more problem spaces and ways that things can be solved with LLMs and going deeper in niches, you know, uh Rick, our uh what is he now? Chief revenue officer, marketing officer, chief slop officer, something like that. Slop lord. He wrote a great piece though about just the bullcase of like, you know, being so many more people building apps, so many more apps being shipped, the power of LLMs to address problems in new ways, to go deeper into niches, go broader. Like, there's just going to be more software doing more

14:32for humans in the future. And I I I think that's a reason to be bullish. And I think a lot of that is going to happen on iPhones and Android devices. You think so? I would be my question. Like I I go back and forth. I think it's reasonable that the phone that will persist, right? It's hard to beat a tiny piece of magic glass that's has a massive supply chain built up behind it and like has like a form factor that seems not super far from optimal, right? But also people are historically terrible at predicting the future. So like I'm I'm not going to say that for sure. I'll go out

15:08on a limb and I've thought about this a lot and had this debate on Twitter various times over the years, but humans are inherently visual creatures. And this whole idea of like, oh, you're just going to wake up and like ask chat GPT, hey, what's my calendar and like what's the weather look like? And all that and then they're going to respond in voice and you're just going to have all this like voice first communication and stuff. A picture is worth a thousand words. You that's a saying for a reason. And I think even if you're using voice to interact a lot, you're going to want some

15:38kind of display. So yes, maybe it does switch to like, you know, glasses with a heads up display, but even then, like we're such a long way from that technology being good enough to have enough of an interface. We haven't got a good enough prototype to even validate if it's a good thing. Yeah. And then what do what do people spend most of their time doing anyway? They're on Instagram

15:57looking at pictures and videos and things like that. We don't need that. You know what I mean? There's not much more bandwidth to be squeezed out of like a next form factor, right? It, you know, the phone, yeah, it's a very high bandwidth. It's very good form factor. It's well engineered and if it does move to glasses, it will just be like a evolution of the phone in a way. Look, we you could have called in 2007 that you wouldn't have your your Max anymore, but I think pretty much

16:21everybody with the exception of the like casual computer user who like is just browsing email. anybody who's like serious about compute like in any way like still uses a computer, right? And I think even most people still use a computer. I don't know what the penetration numbers are actually. I think I'm I'm 80% bullish, but I do want to like I want to leave myself. Stranger things have happened, right? Stranger things have happened. Who knows? Maybe when the meta glasses, the AR glasses get really good. We have a different opinion. But I don't know. There's not a strong track record right now of any of these devices going completely viral. But like

16:54you would say that too in 2005 about smartphones, right? On Twitter and and kind of in in the forefront of all this with like us tech nerds, it does seem like there's a lot of people who think it's going to happen a lot faster than it really is. Is with the singularity. No, more just that like oh the phone's going to be obsolete. Apps are going to be We'll call that we'll call that the uh the app developer singularity for all intents and purposes. Like apps are dead is like a saying for the past like 15 years. It's like, [laughter] yeah, yeah, cursor's dead, too. Like,

17:25everybody thinks things are dead. It's all going to happen much more slowly than than you would think reading Twitter. I mean, even like I get on the hype train of like, oh, you know, robots are going to be doing my laundry and dishes. It's like, yeah, eventually [laughter] 20 years. Yeah. I'm not going to make any bets on the state of subscription apps in 20 whatever that is 56. No, what year? 46. 206. But we've got some time to keep building these these little apps that help people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean like look, I think developers are going to go where the economics are. People came to the app store because it was the place to build where they

18:00could make money. Like that's not going to shift like completely overnight. And I I still I called I'm call I called it to somebody yesterday. The wet layer. Like I think there's going to always be a wet layer of software between like the human and the human. I just think there will be because there's always going to be like that last 10% that a that a bot can't just like oneshot that like OpenAI doesn't quite understand natively in the model. There are just certain things where like even today that we could automate but we don't. You know what I mean? Like because

18:30people want people in the loop, right? Like sales like could you automate SA like completely? Yeah. Like people try. It's like called self-s serve, right? But there's still this like niche. I mean you call it niche. It's like when you're selling big ticket items like you people want a wet layer. [laughter] They want like a human in the loop, right? And it's not necessarily doesn't even make it better, right? It just makes you feel it's a feelings thing. I don't know what that looks like in software at scale, but it's plausible to think that there's at least a case, but I don't know, David. This could be a podcast by horseshoe salesmen in 1910. Do you know what I mean? Like

19:03convinced, oh yeah, it's going to change, but it's not going to be that fast. These things are loud and noisy and they break down all the time. You know, talk about cars. So, I always want to leave the possibility that we're just like we're just like out of step. And I think if you know if anybody of our listeners are worried about it, good be worried about it. I mean, you're playing in a market like anytime you're in a market, you need to be smart and you need to be like eyes up and you need to be, you know, if you want to win and compete like you have to be thinking

19:27a little bit ahead. So, you should be trying these tools. You should be looking at what's going on in the market. you should be at the same time not losing the fundamentals which is like helping customers achieve their goals and like talking to users and like all of these things. I think that's maybe one anti pattern I've seen is like u maybe the open call rage has been a things like a finally an AI is going to run my company get me to 10k MR make no mistakes and like that's cool there's definitely leverage and claw tool like open call and things like this but I think

19:57the problem with free leverage is that everybody gets it you know like so it's like it very quickly the alpha like the advantage it gives you over the market is is fleeting right so as long as you have some information that other people don't. You know, something that other people don't. That's how you get like lasting alpha and lasting competitiveness in the market. So, anyway, well, it's been a great podcast, David. Thank you. We're done [laughter] here. We haven't even talked numbers. Oh, right. The boring part. No, it's we numbers. We don't need to talk numbers. No, I know most of you who read the report are just going to skip over the methodology section,

20:32but the methodology section is bigger and better than ever before. and we we actually explain in a lot more detail than we have in the past a lot of what went on behind the scenes to generate the numbers what they mean and stuff like that and so to better understand the report spend a few minutes read the methodology I'll give a few highlights in preparing the report we didn't just look at all data we did filter by apps that have active subscription revenue and meet minimum thresholds of installer revenue so we did actually like lob off the kind of I I don't even know. I I

21:07should have asked this. I don't know if it's like 10% or 25%, but like this is not data from like, you know, the app that's only gotten 10 installs and one subscriber or something like that. We do some data preparation certainly that we think is appropriate to to getting good signal. And then for Revenue Cat customers to understand, it is all fully anonymized and aggregated. So you're not going to see any individuals data in there. I've begged for years to figure out some way to include scatter plots because they're an easier way to like really understand distributions, but that would technically show individual user data. So, we don't do scatter plots. You could always do a

21:44distribution and then just make up a fake scatter plot. Uh [laughter] yeah, sample Monte Carlo style or 2027. We'll do that. And then one interesting note this year and definitely worth kind of like reading the description in more detail, but we separated AI apps from nonAI apps to just kind of get a sense for like what's going on in the market. And we've emailed all the investors of nonAI apps. So it's time to get with it, get with the program. And so just as an overview, whether an app uses AI or ML models for its primary value is kind of how we're trying to and it,

22:20you know, it's fairly subjective. This is not an objective measure. There's not like a checkbox people do in the app store of like this is an AI app. You know when you see it that sparkles, it uh costs more. So that that part is not you know perfect but we did our best and it is interesting to kind of make those comparisons and some of the comparisons and we'll talk about it is that you know AI apps are commanding a much higher average revenue per user and things like that. Uh so it is interesting to break it down by those. First chart, apps are booming. We kind

22:53of already talked about this, but when you look at the chart, it's freaking wild. From in 2022, in January of 2022, 2,000 new subscription apps were launched per month. In January 2026, 14,700 over 14,700. So 7x 7x increase in the number of subscription ads in a month. There's a lot I I can concur. Uh we are seeing a similar thing actually and most of that growth is

23:24concentrated in the last six months I think. Like one thing to note real quick too this is data. These two slides we'll talk about at the start are actually from app figures data. So yeah it's not it's not data. This is the entire market. This is not just revenue cap. Although we're shipping in a large very proportionate yeah [laughter] to that grow that I mean we certainly like have tracked that curve. But yeah, I think I mean this is goes back to what we were just talking about, but like we're in unprecedented times as they say. But yeah, again, it's just like the natural what happens when you drop the cost of production massively. You get a you get an over supply or

23:58I mean they called it an over supply, you get a massive supply boost on apps, which is great. I think app we've seen Apple trying to catch up like app reviews been like bogged down. Like we've been obviously like trying to handle all the interest and demand. Interestingly, this is like B2B insider stuff, but like these new customers are easier than old like you know why they talk to the bot. The bot does everything. They don't even like they get API like I don't even know we're a company really. They just set the account up. They're you know the wet layer just does the OOTH thing and like we're done. But like we've not seen like an increase in our ticket volume

24:32which has been interesting. I think also we've gotten just better the product gets better so we tickets go down but like it's been really we've done a lot of work you know building the revenue cap MCP and like we put a lot of work into making it really easy for agents to do the implementation like it's just in terms of like watching like it's a good it doesn't it's not really relevant for this crowd but like it's a good anecdote on like why the charts that and ratios you got used to in the old world don't really apply because it changes just change just things change like

25:00you wouldn't expect like you think a thousand more 7x more users There are seven times more tickets. Nope. We've got seven times more users per month and like same number of tickets. It's like what? And then you're like, oh, it's cuz they're already talking to an AI. So, they just keep talking to the AI and can solve 90% of those problems for them, which is great. One thing I was surprised in

25:18these I figured numbers is that iOS now accounts for 77% of an all new subscription app launches. And that's up from 67% in 2023. I would have thought that if you're vibe coding an app, why not just use React Native and launch it on both platforms, but apparently a lot of folks are just either going native or still just not bothering to launch on. I mean, one thesis, I'm just riffing, but like could be the app store schle like getting all your accounts approved, getting all your your stuff in place, your bank accounts, D has become a larger proportion of the painful part of building an app. So like only doing that on one store reduces, you know,

26:02you don't have to also go do that on play, right? So maybe that's part of it, right? As a ratio of total work, but also it's not a huge shift like 66 to 70 or whatever it was. Yeah. Gosh, I didn't even think about that. But no, that's a really good point. Like if you're vibe coding an app over a weekend and the agent's doing most of the work, if two hours of like figuring out how to create a Google Play account and like entering your social social or setting up a company and getting your Dun's You got hung up on getting a Dun's number. I [laughter] know. Yeah, I'm still hung up. I' I've

26:32been I'm I'm two months into getting a new app store account set up. Never going to happen. I'm done. I'm retired. It's like that. It's funny that just setting up an account is one of the harder things in building an app. Yeah, this is a bottle the bottlenecks have shifted, you know. So, I don't know. It's interesting. Another chart we included from app figures is the share of revenue in 2025 from cohort of when the apps were built. Am I explaining that well? You want to take How old are the apps? How old are the apps that are making money? What changed? older apps are making

27:08most of the money. I mean, and it's not a change. It's just like a state of what's going on today. 69% of revenue in the app stores is coming from apps that were released before 2020. I almost commented on the doc to be like most of history is in the past news at 11, right? It's like of course, but like winners win, they compound. And I think we'll always I don't know if it's shifted precipitously. I think you could imagine a world where like you know more revenue was coming from newer apps would be a story in terms of like a higher dynamicism in the app store like just more

27:42tumult but it's just like come on like you're not going to just like the compounding advantage that Straa and Class dojo is a good example maybe and like I was also thinking Duolingo like all these like and then of course like all of the the media companies Netflix and those They're going to just continue. They're not going to shrink. You know what I mean? Most likely they might trade a little bit back and forth. You know, I would love So, we should go back and do so. We could reproduce a Sosa 2020 cuz like I think you'd probably see the same story [laughter] and be like most of the

28:14apps are produced before 2015. It's like, yeah, of course. Yeah. It just takes time to mature. The interesting thing on this chart though is that you do see 2022 and 2023. They kind of bucketed it weird, but 2020 to 2021 is 9% of the revenue. 2022 to 2023 is 14% of the revenue. So there was a bump in 2023 and I would imagine that's actually mostly chat GPT. Yeah. Open air. Yeah. I mean I don't know app figures numbers, right? So like 2023. Yeah. Was it wasn't just chat GPT. It was like it's like all of these like you know the next 10 you know a lot of these like foundation

28:49models launch their products in 2023 which yeah it's probably what you're seeing there which is interesting. That's that that is interesting when you see like a displacement like that where the where the older cohorts actually producing a smaller share and that kind of really illustrates the shift that we've gone through. And this is going to be really interesting to follow up on in the coming years because this is the chart that's going to show you disruption like are these newer cohorts of apps disrupting older apps and like taking bigger shares growing faster you know capturing wallet supply demand question implies the demand is limited right which if the demand's

29:24growing fast enough everybody's growing and just it's different rates yeah it's hard to visualize so an interesting one to look at now and I think it'll be even more fascinating the next couple But speaking of growing faster, that's the next thing I wanted to talk about was we have a chart in here talking about year-over-year growth in MR. And this is fascinating and it it's just a perfect illustration of power laws is that the top 10% of apps grew 306% and the bottom actually lost money and the median app only grew 5.3%. So what was the GDP growth of the last year? Yeah, about 5.3%. [laughter] Isn't that funny how these things level out? Um, but that's a median, right? It's

30:12not an averaging of all those things. Actually, probably if you average the average of the app store is much higher because those outliers just contribute that top 5% that top 2% of MR growth last year probably drives a huge chunk of the total MR average movement and that won't affect median as much. But yeah, I mean that's winners and losers. the sorting machine. this that's what Stripe called it a bunch in their annual report this year's the sorting machine is I don't know who's that they didn't come up with that but like these markets are just sorting machines and they're going to sort the fittest to the top and the and the least fit to the bottom and and

30:44yeah I mean we've seen you know again I'll draw B2B like we've seen just insane meteoric growth rates at the very top tippy top of companies like cursor just announced yesterday that added like a billion in revenue in a month and that company or in a quarter and that company's only two years old or something like this just totally unprecedented. We're seeing that too in in these AI apps, right? Like if you were the app that has the model that's the best like you can just get numbers that never were possible before because that just that level of differentiation was never possible before. Like you could be the best whatever like I use my friend Flighty the best like

31:23flight tracking app ever. I don't know if they ever, you know, had that level. You know what I mean? Like and stuff. It's just like you have this ability that if you've done the capex cap capital expenditures to build one of these models when you go to monetize it it's truly better. I mean that's why the capex spending is so crazy. It's because it's like the returns are there. I wouldn't anybody I think unless Sam's listening or Dario's listening or I don't think anybody should feel too bad if they're not in that that top top category. Like there's a lot of that means half the apps are above 5.3. You're beating that GDP. you should be, you know, you should be kind of

31:56happy about that in some way. Right now, if you're doing, if you lost 33% last year, it's like, you know, maybe rethink your strategy. Yeah. Rich get richer, poor get poorer. I mean, that's just the way things probably people's apps they've abandoned, right? It's, you know, you have to think about that, too. It's like just because Oh, I'm in I'm in that I'm in that stat. Yeah. If you have an app in this data set, you've written it off for whatever reason. You might just be moved on. It might just not be the best ROI anymore. So, there's that's always in the data set, too. So, these are not like all strivvers, right? Right. These are not all apps that are trying

32:24necessarily. I had a big launch in 2024 that did really well and then we did not follow that up with marketing. Yeah. I mean basically like treading water implies effort, right? It implies like you're continuing to to adapt and whatever the new marketing thing is and whatever the new features thing is. though. But it is interesting that the top 25% of apps grew 80% year-over-year and it's a bigger market and there's more money and so like there there are more apps making more money than ever. And as concentrated as it is in those top apps growing 300% year-over-year, 25% of apps growing 80% year-over-year. Like there's a lot of growth happening and a lot of apps making a

33:04lot of money. So yeah, I mean just think of the return on capital, right? Like even if you're spending most of that, I don't know how the economics of the Cali ideal went. I thought they were you trying to get him on the podcast. Maybe we can get some more details. But like, you know, if you think, you know, they probably, I don't know, or maybe margin break even the whole time, right? Just reinvesting in growth, but then you have a big liquidity event at the end, you know, that's a way to monetize that all all of a sudden and stuff. So, it's like if you can in any way

33:29drive 80% growth, even if it's break even, like that's probably a good bet. If you think you have something like with some amount of durability, which like a good fitness app might be, right? And with subscriptions, it's it's that compounding. If you have reasonable retention, the million dollars of ad spend this year, let's say you had the median retention, which is near 30%. We'll just say 30. I think it's 27. But if you have median annual retention and you spend a million dollar in here in March of 2026, then March of 2027, that's $300,000 in free cash flow. And I' I've talked to a lot of apps. If you have a 1x like CAC to LTV or whatever,

34:08like first year payback period, you profitably spend a million this month in the first year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ju just barely break even that next year. That's just free cash flow. So Yeah. And then and those retention rates get better if the product is sticky. It's like and you also build I mean there's all these like compounding things you build. You build a list right now. You have even all your churned customers become people you can market to like more or less in perpetuity and like uh and all these things. So I think there's still apps and this is maybe a meta thing but like apps is like a venture target is still like a very rare asset class. I don't think

34:40there's a ton of apps with like venture capital is the right financing, but there's certainly still like good financial engineering that you can do to like grow these apps with, you know, capital very quickly and and it can pay off in some cases. It it was really interesting talking to Olivia Moore from Andre Horwitz, though. She's pretty bullish on consumer. I I feel like there's

35:01it's if you can make a hundred bets. Well, [laughter] yeah. Yeah. It keeps going in waves. And what she shared and what we're seeing is some of these consumer apps are are growing faster and exploding in ways and you know if you lump in some of these like lovables and replets and other stuff a lot of that growth is actually consumer growth of people who are tinkering with these and playing with them and using them for those kind of things versus like not strictly B2B growth. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see though how how venture capital PE and others treat consumer moving forward as as the market grows, as competition gets harder. I think probably right now,

35:41at least on the PE side, it's probably everybody's going to wait a little bit because like I just don't think everybody really knows. There's a lot of like B2B software roll up PE that's probably of questionable valuation at the moment. Yeah. Um that might just be a a January February 2026 thing, but when growth curves are unpredictable, that's actually when venture should be playing, right? Um but then when we kind of understand these financial assets a little bit better, that's where like lower risk portfolio builds like P and stuff do. And and that's where I I do feel like and again I talked to Olivia about this in the in the minis episode we did is that it is a

36:17blue ocean now of how do you rethink all of these entrenched consumer apps like what's the AI first calm and calm's not necessarily going to be the one to build that you have to make the choice if you're that if you're that firm right you have to make the choice to to reinvent yourself right and to probably break some of your precious eggs or whatever um in the process And that historically not always been the case that that firms have like adapted and that's where 2026 and 2027 might be the years we see the next like chat GBTS where the you know launch this year and get to hundreds

36:53of millions of revenue in Claude's on a run their Super Bowl ad paid off like they're like Anthropic making a making a real run at consumer already. We thought this was like a one category by OpenAI. App figures just shared data that that the claude app went from making like hundreds of thousands a month a day over Oh yeah, a day to over almost a million dollars a day in revenue. So that that just exploded when it seemed obvious that Chad GPT had won that market. Yeah. I mean it's look consumers are I will say like the Chad GPT app defined the category but that it's rarely that

37:27the category initial category definer remains I mean maybe not rarely but it's not given and if nothing else they create space so like I don't count like there's a lot of great you know you think of perplexity Gemini like there's a lot you know these are these are probably categories that I don't know how many of our listeners are playing in this handful of companies but that same mindset can apply to every other niche where it's like yeah so and those owned this category for a million years. But like if you're a little hungry, you've got some tokens to burn and some ideas, like I don't know, go poke a bear. You know what I mean? See what happens. Like why not? Yeah. And

38:03for a lot of these apps, people are going to use multiple. Like I have Claude and ChatGpt. Yeah. I have a I have a Claude Max. I have ChatGBT Mac or Codex Max. I have all of them. It depends on the day. You know what I want for which each thing? Gemini. I have a Gemini subscription, too. I have them all. We just keep coming back to I think there's still so much opportunity and we should have a so someone year David where we get on we just there's no more opportunity. Sorry no podcast. That'll be you'll you'll know there's no more opportunity when we've all done when we've

38:30all paper hands this thing and we've all exited to private equity or whatever. That's how you'll know you won't get a podcast. [gasps] Oh man. Humor. It's humor David. It's jokes. It's fine. So the next thing I did want to talk about is one of the the key takeaways from the report. I think it's like page four in the report. Hard payw walls crush fremium on download to paid. Hard payw walls convert five times better than premium. They do 10.7% download to paid by day 35 versus 2.1% for premium apps. Huge. No day like the present. You know what I mean? That's my that's my thesis on

39:08on why that's so much so so much better. But uh I'm surprised it's that stark. Honestly, this is a tough one because I mean I have a hard pay wall in my app. I've talked to a lot of people who are moving to hard payw walls. I this really does boil down to a a strategy decision of you know are you building something that's going to be a category leader where that fremium base is meaningful? Are there advantages to having that fremium base? Are they telling their friends about it? Are there network effects? Are there data effects? you know, is there a reason to have free users in the

39:43app? Yeah. And if not, I mean, a hard payroll does kind of make sense. And unless you have a viral thing you're trying to do or like, you know, you want your brand to be Yeah. I I mean, I think this is not necessarily new. I think it's just become more standard practice. And like I I would say like not doing this is probably becoming the exception. Unless you're just it's a side project or whatever, then you know, you don't feel comfortable. Don't force yourself to do it. But if you're like if you've got a good product, if you believe in it, if it's valuable, like you think it's valuable and you're and you're doing spend like you're doing acquisition, like I

40:18think you'd you know, unless you're very very very dedicated to it, like I think there's it's worth considering for the right app though, Fremium can be super powerful. I I did one of the min episodes I did was with um Michael from Mojo and their app does more than 50% of revenue not on the first day. And so we we'll get to stats in this report but you know most apps see 80% of their conversions on the first day zero that people are opening the app. He sees that as a superpower is that they have a generous free tier and so they do convert a lot of people on day zero on that first

40:58day, but then they they're able to convert a ton of people over time. And one of the things that he talked about in that episode is they're doing a payw wall on launch for premium users and they're tasteful about it. they only do it once a week and stuff, but it's like now instead of getting this one shot, you get somebody in and if they retain and keep using the app, you've got a lot of opportunities to keep hitting them with like, oh, check out this free feature, premium feature, you know, upgrade here. There's probably there's a spectrum, right? It's not hard payw wall or no

41:28pay, no full premium. And you know what I mean? like you can maybe even a phase like you launch hard pay wall and then you get the product where you feel good about it and then then you switch to fremium. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I think like your your acquisition strategy should inform this probably more than than just our our one anecdote and stuff. But uh but yeah, every I was saying on this the podcast, David, since we've had a podcast, people undercharge. They don't believe their stuff's worth it. They like have imposttor syndrome and like all these things. They think everybody's going to get mad at them because they didn't give them something for free. Look, always

42:01we I was having the debate today about stuff and remedy cat and us charging for it and it's like look they could just not have it. We could just not make it. Is that better? What do you want? You know um you know so it's like it's a I think it's a thing that this is like a first- time founder thing some too. But some people are just super sensitive about it and like also just pricing is so transient like people don't like if you try it and people don't like it you can just roll back nobody's going to know you know it's fine but it's definitely something to try. I wanted to have

42:30this conversation and be a little more nuanced because if you go look at the report it's like oh hard pay wall is obviously the thing to do like it's going to make me five times more money. Well maybe just paste Sosa into Claude and just make more money. Make no mistakes [laughter] you know. Um, and I don't know that might outperform a human overthinking it, right? Uh, let your bot do the overthinking, but I mean I think it falls into the same category as everything, you know, David, there's this just make it a good report and then there's like, you know, all the nuance, right? It's maybe doesn't fit in the report always, but I don't think there's any I don't

43:03I think the data is true and like there's just this like this is in life and software, you know, there's no time like the present, right? when somebody's in your app and they're using your app, the cross-section of intent and numbers and everything is usually just at its peak. So like make as much hay out of it as possible because 7 days from now, even if your app is great for them, they're not going to care as much. So maximize that moment. And that's the thing about fremium is that they people actually have to retain for them to open the app and see your payw wall

43:33again. [laughter] And so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have them now like you're going to miss a shot. you know, you're going to lose half of them in a, you know, 50% day one retention would be great. So, you're going to lose half of them tomorrow. And again, it's like they've already crossed a lot of chasms to get to you. They searched, they had intent, they downloaded, they opened, they went through your onboarding, right? You're never going to have them as primed and as jazzed about your product as they are right now. So, like capture it on the hard versus soft payw wall or hard paywall versus premium. The one thing I was surprised is that retention on the hard payw wall

44:09was right in line. I mean, a little lower than year one retention for premium. So, you know, I I kind of would have guessed, you know, an app that forces you into the decision day one and you can't even use the app. I would have assumed human meatag intuition like those people will probably

44:26turn at a higher rate because you like force them into the decision. But it's pretty equivalent. Like the P90 retention on premium is 58% and for hard pay wall it's 54 but the median is 27.7 for premium and 26.8 for yearly. A kind of a wash in the median. Um so you're not sacrificing retention or or I mean each app is going to be different but in aggregate people aren't sacrificing retention by doing a hard pay wall. It's actually a little bit it's a little bit non non obvious to me that I wouldn't move it, but because usually anytime you like change something substantial, it's gonna move your mix, but there's probably two forces there. I'm not going to speculate,

45:11but there's probably one that increases and one that decreases and they're just balancing each other out would be my guess. Uh but but yeah, it's free money. Just do it. Free money. [laughter] All right. The next thing I wanted to talk about was the window to when a user is closing. 55% of all 3-day trial cancellations happen on day zero. This is another chart that when you look at it, it's just massive concentration just stark that that's a flip side of the same thing point we just made, right? Which is like, you know, most of the things happen in that first day, you know, including them cancelling your trial, right? [laughter] Yeah. People start that trial and then

45:51immediately go to this. This has been a growing trend. I don't think we shared year-over-year numbers here, but I believe it's it's been a continued trend that this goes up every year that more and more consumer savviness, right? Yeah. Yeah. Apple's also been more betterer about like sending out notifications and things. Um, but that makes sense. I mean, good good, you know, [laughter] good. Yeah. I love an autorenewing trial, autocon converting. It's great for it's great for app developers. It's it's seamless for consumers, but also I think if consumers are opting out, it's good too. Let them do it, you know. One little tactical point. I talked to Enmol

46:30from Dualingo in one of the mini episodes and he said Dolingo had been experimenting with that trial reminder kind of the link trial reminder uh payw wall where it's hey, we'll remind you uh about the trial so you can cancel it. Well, now Dolingo experimented with letting people choose what day they want to get the reminder on, which draws attention to, hey, like we're going to remind you about this free trial. Um, and so they saw a conversion uplift from that. So yeah, I mean, you're you're getting people to not cancel on date zero. Yeah, [laughter] is what is what you're doing. I think I don't know. I prove that, but then you're reminding them. So,

47:10you know, maybe the notification gets lost or whatever, but who knows? Yeah, who knows? These are these are consumers buying at willing prices, David. That's interesting. I mean, it's certainly a good look. I'm still a big fan of the blankets payw wall. I think in the reminders and stuff, I think it's a net brand positive and trying to trick people. All right. Next thing is Google's billiondoll leak. Not a huge fan of that framing. I don't It's just it is what it is. Google Play

47:33is a very different platform with different consumers, with different forms of payment. But it is really interesting that nearly a third of all subscription cancellations on Google Play are involuntary billing failures. Yeah. Yeah. We see this all the time with customers being like, "Why am I getting so many billing issues?" Yeah. Exactly. I don't I couldn't tell you exactly the the reasoning for that. I don't know if it's just like economics of who owns Androids. I don't know if it's like um the way they do this some payment method because Google will let you use prepaid

48:06cards and stuff like this. Exactly. So then your balance runs out and then the billing fails. Yeah. The physics are just very different. There's not an autoreovery path like there is on iOS. I mean there's just there's just a whole number of reasons. It just compounds the fact that makes like Android. So even if you get you still see like you know whatever I don't know what our blend is, but it's 10 15% Android revenue versus the rest iOS probably and web. But like you see why it's not just a market's not there. It's like also the bucket's leakier, the conversion's harder,

48:37you know, and stuff. I'm good on Google for putting in a good fight, keeping it going. We need two platforms. But yeah, it answers your question about why people are continually increase their iOS concentration uh from earlier. As I was researching this, Google did share one of their like developer pages that folks who turn on grace period and there there's another feature. It's I'm don't remember it off the top of my head, but you need to be especially on Android, you need to be thinking about this managing this problem. Yeah. Well, there I mean there's also like communication issu things you can do like you can support and we have we have good hooks for this in revenue catat

49:12to make it easier you should do all the things right like especially once once Android's beyond just like experimental revenue for you and it kind of makes sense like the the Apple platform is way more oriented around keeping your credit card up to date. Everything is Apple Pay. You've got your Apple subscription to keep your photo library in the cloud. It it feels like as a platform, they do kind of more strongly incentivize you to keep your billing updated, keep keep money flowing through their systems. It's the whole benefit of having a great retail partner, right? They make the buying experience good. They keep consumers coming and you're willing to pay a fee for it,

49:48right? So, and then speaking of churn on Google Play, we did include an interesting chart about the reasons for cancellation. So, there's actually an API that we call and get this data from our customers because Google asks when you cancel in Google Play, why did you cancel? And then we're able to get that data and then aggregate it. And so, it's interesting. The top reason is cost related. And it swapped back and forth. I think last year it was maybe not enough usage but I mean aren't those not the same answer though you know what I mean like it's not enough usage to justify the cost right they're sort of like interrelated reasons right so I necessarily read but uh but if

50:27you combine the two that's a good point if you combine the two as a as a value proposition I'm not using it enough to be worth the money that's 70% of cancellations so it makes sense economics you know people stop paying for stuff they don't want technical issues is small found a better app is small. So like you're you're more likely to use a lose a customer because the value prop is not there than you are because they found a different app that solves that need. App developers tweets is that on there? No. [laughter] No. Okay. Good. All right. Uh back to AI apps. So AI apps sell but

51:04they don't stick. AI saw this is interesting. AI powered apps generate 41% more revenue per pair, but they churn 30% faster. Year one retention is 21% versus 31%. That's interesting. I mean it does feel like there there have been so many generative AI apps launched and some of them are you know the studio Gibli like when that that exploded for chat GPT but a bunch of like other apps jumped on that bandwagon and released apps. I think it's like they've not most of these have not solved the sticky like building stickiness like chat GPT I'm going to throw them under the bus a little bit on this. It's like yeah they have memory but like I don't feel super invested in

51:51my chat GPT app history right I open it I run a query it's whatever and then it's transient codeex is a little bit different because I'm like building sort of like my codeex workflows and things like this but that's a very niche thing and I think this is one of the things that like openclaw kind of blew open which was like just give this thing more stuff that about you right give it more integrations give it like obviously give it more power is helpful but I think like it But even even open claw as an example at the end of the day it's a bunch of integrations

52:21and skill files which are like fairly transferable right and that's like on the like agent side but like you know I think we're just in an emerging market where like new products are coming out every 3 months and people are willing to shift and there's not a huge like lock in effect now you've seen I think of the Chad GPT they've open's been pushing their medical thing like they're like bring all your medical history in like now and and Like obviously one I think it'll be a very useful feature but then secondly it serves a purpose for them of like okay now if open AI has I have

52:52my my epic chart whatever is linked to it and has all my medical records and like all of this stuff like I think you start to build those but it's going to take a while it's going to take a while for these products to like really figure out what their sticky you know like they're let's assume we hit like terminal some sort of like terminal model functionality at some point they're going to need to like innovate on more of the consumer features I think it also just shows people are willing to try stuff like there have been so many new AI powered apps launching like to do this

53:22photo manipulation. Oh yeah, I'll sub to anything right now if it's novel, you [laughter] know, new photo thing, new audio thing, whatever. I'll try it 20ucks a month. A good sign people are willing to try stuff. But AI apps do need to figure this out for the long haul to get those sticky. usually the longtail like runs like I don't know if you're building but I think you actually have a better if you're like doing an applied you have a very different problem you're like your straa as an example or like a straa clone or something like this like you're building a still building a data mode like of stuff and I actually I think this is a it's an interesting you know I think

53:57that there's a lot of discussion going on like where's the defensibility in software because like one it's cheaper to make software and all this stuff but there's still a tons of defensibility in that like long-term customer relationship it's like dropback X has all my photos, Strava has all my workouts, all of these things, right? And those can't be vibe coded in a weekend. You're actually in a stronger position than these like brand new and also like mostly stateless like AI tools that yeah, I've had better stickiness for my like little personal open call deployment just because I can modify it and I'm building I'm building an empire inside of it of things it can do. Not so

54:30much in my my chat GPTs and and things like this. So yeah, doesn't surprise me. All right, another hot take that deserves a little nuance. Trials of 17 days or longer convert 70% better than short trials. 42.5% versus 25.5%. But year-over-year, more apps shifted to 3-day trials. So, this is one where and I've talked to to Rick about this. I think this is a correlation versus causation kind of thing. Will you get better conversion if you have a longer trial? Maybe. It's worth trying, but I don't think you're guaranteed that. And and the thing about 3-day free trials, like the reason people do that is cash flow. You you brought that up. You want the money in three days. You don't

55:17want the money in a 30 days straight. And getting conversion data faster to compound experiments you're doing on onboarding and payw wall and everything else like that. So, it's tough because yes, in an ideal state, maybe everybody offered 14 days or 30 days or whatever and the data shows that those longer trials convert better. But, um, but it could still be a net loss if you're having to like if you're losing that like information flow, you're losing that cash flow, you're losing all those things. Like even yeah, you got to eek out a few points on conversion rate, it might not be worth it. Back to what we were talking about earlier with the day zero cancellations. I mean,

55:53that that is probably part of it is that when you have a 14-day free trial, it's like, oh, or or I mean 17 plus meaning 30-day free trials. Like there's a little bit more of a like, oh, I've got plenty of time to check this out. And like, you know, you don't immediately go turn off auto renew because you're like, oh, I'll I'll remember to turn that off. You know, maybe that's some of it. Just that. But I think there there's probably a bit where the apps that are giving 30-day free trials are different kinds of apps than the apps that are offering 30-day free trials. some

56:23selection bias, right? Like, and then just like apps too that are if you're spending a lot on ads, you're probably less differentiated. I don't know if that's true. It's not because you spend on ads, but if you're like in a competitive market, you often need to. I think everything in the SOS so report is worth like considering some of those dynamics. Like we can't like fully separate causation and correlation. So, it's perfectly plausible, right? Which is why I mean going back to nuance is like why you should never take one of these single data points and treat it as gospel because it's going to be different for your app, you know, run your business on it. All right,

56:54two two quick hits as we wrap up. We shared a really cool word chart is the distribution of paywall call to action language. So we shipped our paywall solution, well we shipped our first paywall solution a couple years ago, but we've been like accumulating all this data now of what people are actually using on their payw walls. And so you you look at this word chart. Continue is still like the biggest. Subscribe is the second biggest. But you got a whole bunch of like this is a fun chart to just look at for CTA. What are some good ones? I don't have it in front of me. David,

57:26redeem offer, get premium, get started now, start for free, go pro. I mean, there's a just a ton. I want to look at the longtail. Those are the ones that lots of people use. We should look at the ones that like very few people use cuz I I was reading like some of the little tiny No, I mean they're like the oneups. Those are probably the weird ones. But uh the one I'm not seeing in Oh, no. It is in here. It's one of the smallest ones, but uh try for $0 and zero. Um I talked to the chief product officer at Duolingo on the podcast and that that was released back in

57:57I think January. Um, and he said that was like a meaningful lift for them and and like try for free did not convert as well as try for $0. [laughter] Looks like you got a bug. But anyway, just another example of how the 2026 report is better and bigger than ever. Like this. It really is fun to see this word chart and and look through all these different words and phrases in there. The last one I wanted to touch on was the cancellation timeline for annual subscriptions. This is really cool. We've shared this in different forms over the years, but I actually really like the the

58:29visualization here. Yeah, I saw. Yeah, I agree. That's a good way to look at it. What it shows is for people who ultimately churn, when did they turn off autorenew? And and when we first pulled this data years ago, it surprised I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but I always expected that for an annual subscription, you would see a large portion, if not the majority of people who churn turn right before, you know, in month 12, right before it renews. But no, 34%, this is across all categories, 34% cancel in that first month and only 11%. So there's a bump because month 11 is uh 4.7% and it bumps up to 11% and then like right at the renewal time

59:11like people will turn on but it's not like a U it's like a a J but like a tiny J curve. I just would have I just said always intuition would have expected this to be way higher. But anyways what what this says is that people are turning off autorenew when they see that charge hit the credit card or you know soon after. They're making that decision sooner rather than later. So, just another just like we're talking about with zero day zero free trials and getting people to retain and things like that. It's like you got to make your impression soon [laughter] because they're not just people aren't just sticking around and making that decision at day 364. I

59:49was just jazzed about the visualization. I thought that was like finally we figured out a way to make it not look dumb and hard to read. So, [laughter] we're renovating over here, you know, wait for the SOSA report. It's going to be even better. Yeah. Uh, no. The problem is we're gonna we're gonna this is the ideal and next year we're going to try something worse. But that's okay, [laughter] you know. But do do we even need visualizations in 2026? You're just going to dump this into cloud code. Oh, yeah. And and have have your agent tell you to plug this. We're supposed to plug this. Uh,

1:00:20but yeah, I was just thinking about this. So, it's one of the inputs. So, we're working on some cool stuff here. Like, we've talked about AI stuff, but we've been hacking on uh Revenue Cat's own agent internally, which I'm workshopping right Yeah, I don't know if it'll announce this, but it's revenue intelligence co-pilot. Rico, he makes you Rico. I'm really I'm more excited about that than everybody else on the team. So, we'll see how we actually ship it. I didn't know it was an acronym and I've thought Rico is kind of goofy. [laughter] But, no, it's revenue intelligence co-pilot. It just happens to also mean rich in Spanish, which I think is fun. But, yeah, we've we've built a you

1:00:48know, I think a lot of people in the community have been have kind of hacked this together, which is like pulling your revenue cap data and maybe some other stuff. we want to bring this to like a first-party feature into the revenue cap platform as we like figure out like what does it mean to be a system of record you know in the future and I don't think that I don't think there's any great there's there's not going to be any vendor um our customers have they feel great about that doesn't have like well-built agentic interaction like built into it and so we're we're figuring that out I'll be honest you know we're mostly a JSON and databases company so this is

1:01:20like all new territory for us but it's not rocket surgery as they say and what we've seen seen this thing produce. I mean, David, you've used it before. It's pretty fun. Yeah, it's it's it's great. It's a fun way to interact with it. It also can just do things that you can everything you can do in Revenue Cat is just what the agent can do, but it's just faster. It's got it can click faster. It can pull data faster. It adds a little bit of color, which maybe isn't even the most valuable part. The most valuable part is like it can just pull the charts a lot faster than you

1:01:46can, right? [laughter] So currently we've we've been using internally as a as a Slackbot where you can just ask like at Rico, you know, how how was performance last week? You know, but what's cool is like you hooked up last year's report and then you're going to have it ingest this year's report. So this is integrated auto. Yeah. The reason I wanted to bring this up is because I was going to suggest people just drop the report into a clawed project and then bounce your data in. ask it things you should be thinking about, you know, use it in a project in Claude. But like for Revenue Cat customers who enabled this feature once we release it that like that works out of the

1:02:26box like you just say like how does this compare? You know, what things am I weak on um compared to the the report? What things should I be thinking about? And it's pretty smart. Yeah, these models are great. Nothing to do with us revenue. [laughter] It's all just like we just gave it this stuff. It's actually a good idea. We should note this for but we should release like a a markdown

1:02:45version of the of the report. That'd be easier for people than dropping just like a raw PDF in. But yeah, I'm I'm super excited. I mean, I don't want to plug too much of our book, but like we're like awakening to how we can make Revenue Cap more AI powered and sparkly. And so Rico's kind of this first kind of this first iteration we're hoping to ship. Ideally, maybe this is out before the podcast drops, but we're still putting some finishing touches on it. But we're also working on like how do you agentically interact with payw walls? Like how do vibe code apps or vibe coding

1:03:15environments like create pay walls and and stop having to like click all the time? Basically like in 2026 we're tired of clicking. No more clicking. We're typing no more clicking. Maybe talking but we're not clicking on things anymore. And then and then also like we have an open claw skill which you can use on your you can use it in claude as well. Like we get we should get it on the claude marketplace as well. Yeah, I think we have a GPT a chat GPT plugin now as well. Like it's so fun internally because people just build this stuff and like I I don't even know all the stuff we

1:03:45have. Yeah. And we're adapting to this new world and I think we're just we're just getting started. So hopefully um hopefully that that's live by the time this drops. If not, keep stay tuned. We'll find out. Six days. Sign up for the beta. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, I think it's a good place to wrap up. drop the report into an agent and just have it tell you all the things and [laughter] listen to this podcast. You're probably not listen all the way to the end. You probably had your agent summarize it is reading is is giving you the digest. So, but anyway, if you have listened, it's fun. These are one of my favorite ones we do every year, David. So,

1:04:172026 is a weird time. It's a weird year. It's the weirdness shall increase until morale improves, I believe. So, everybody buckle up. I don't think we're I don't think I don't think we've hit peak weird yet. So, uh, well, I I did want to shout out the team, Peter and Lauraai and everybody else who put in all so much work. Uh, it was a huge group effort, Baron, and we we had a contractor working a lot of I know things must be going well at Revenue Cat when every year I hear less and less about it. Uh, so, you know what [laughter] I mean? The first year it was like a whole team effort and

1:04:50now it's like it's still a lot of people involved, but like it's it's it's operating much more efficiently. Yeah. The first year it just it took so much more of the small team that we had like as a percentage of all work done at Revenue Cat. We pulled in the ops team and then like all this other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then now it's like as we've grown it was still a massive effort but as a percentage of all the work getting done at Revenue Cat, it's much lower. So dear dear listener, we do it for you. You know, we're like investing our finite resources and putting this report

1:05:18together and I think we're really proud of it. So yeah, it turned out great and um so yeah, you've probably already downloaded the report. Check it out and we'll see you later. [laughter] [music] Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community. [music]