Gmail Is Free, but That Didn't Stop It from Having Its First $100M Quarter
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - A Challenging Summer. Check out the full article for more insights.
Most people think Gmail is free, and to many it is, but as soon as you need additional storage, everything changes.
On the App Store, Gmail offers several tiers via in-app purchases that start at just $1.99/mo. But at Google scale, those add up quick!
Gmail just wrapped up its highest quarter of revenue, growing a whopping 26% quarter-over-quarter. That's Gmail's second-highest revenue growth ever since the app's revenue got into the double-digit millions.
Consumers spent $109M in Q2, according to Appfigures Intelligence, roughly $23M more than Q1's haul. That's the biggest absolute jump for the app in the App Store. And I should say, this data is only relevant to the App Store because on Android Google isn't going through Google Play for payments and skips paying itself a fee.
Although it's not TikTok money, our estimates show that users spent $252M on in-app purchases so far this year and only about 44% of that came from the US. The rest spread over a looooooong list of countries where all countries have a single-digit share. And what's even more interesting is that even the smaller countries are paying thousands for their email.
What about the competition? Gmail doesn't really have competitors, but I do want a point of comparison, so I looked at the performance of Yahoo Mail. Yes, that's still a thing.
Yahoo Mail earned $2.8M in net revenue from the App Store this year, according to our estimates, which is about $2.8M more than I expected. But still nothing in comparison to Gmail.
It's true, Gmail is in a league of its own.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.
All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
