I Sold My App Through MacHeist and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Monday, 18 December 2006

  • Total MacHeist revenue (based on final figure of $190,000 raised for charity): $760,000

  • Amount donated to charity: $200,000

  • Estimated total sum paid by MacHeist to the developers of the bundled applications, based, yes, on anonymous sources, but which figure I stand behind, and which, I will further note, has not been disputed since I wrote about it last week: $66,5001

  • Estimated total costs for advertising, web hosting, and web site development: $40,000

  • Estimated profit for the MacHeist team: $463,500

  • MacHeist’s percentage share of the total profit: 87.5

  • Average percentage share of the total profit for each individual developer: 1.3

  • Average percentage share of the total profit for each developer whose company name does not rhyme with “Malicious Donster”: 1.1

  • Closing words from Phill Ryu, wherein he keeps it real:

    Recently, some Mac developers have been telling me how they have begun to doubt that there is a bright future in their business. But after MacHeist, which will go down as one of the biggest successes in the history of Mac shareware, you have sent a message loud and clear: the state of Mac shareware is stronger than ever.

  1. This is actually a little bit less than the amount I estimated in “Iniquities of the Selfish”; I now believe that both David Watanabe (NewsFire) and Allan Odgaard (TextMate) were paid the “standard” flat fee of about $5,000-6,000. ↩︎