What should I pay for an app with users but no revenue?
The short answer
Price the app against what it would cost to build and what those users would cost to acquire through advertising, never against a profit multiple. An app with 12,000 installs and 900 monthly actives at $18,000 works out at $20 per monthly active, which is fair when retention is flat.
What should you pay for an app with users but no revenue?
Pay the higher of replacement cost and the acquisition value of the active users, then adjust for how far the app sits from its first paid customer. There is no multiple in that sentence because there is nothing to multiply, and any seller who opens with one has priced the wrong asset. In the $10,000 to $50,000 band, most pre-revenue apps settle between $10 and $40 per monthly active user.
The number you are solving for is not "what is this worth". It is "what is the most I can pay and still make this work if monetisation takes twice as long as I expect".
What does $18,000 buy at 900 monthly actives?
It buys each active user at $20, and each install at $1.50. Take an app with 12,000 lifetime installs, 900 monthly actives on a defined in-app event, no advertising and no purchases. Both unit prices matter, because the install figure tells you about historical reach and the active figure tells you what still exists.
The ratio between them is the first thing to read. A 7.5% install-to-active ratio on an app that has been live for two years is ordinary. The same ratio on an app launched four months ago means the retention curve has not finished falling and the 900 will be lower by the time the transfer completes.
Is $20 per monthly active reasonable?
It is reasonable when buying the same user through advertising would cost more, and unreasonable when it would cost less. Run the comparison directly. If a paid install in the category costs $3.20 and roughly one install in eight becomes a monthly active, the paid route costs about $26 per active, so $20 is a discount and the app also arrives already built.
If the category buys installs at $0.90 with the same activation rate, paid acquisition costs about $7 per active and $18,000 is a poor use of the money unless the code and the store presence carry most of the value. Check the comparison before you argue about the price.
What would it cost to build the same app?
Replacement cost sets the floor, and for a two-platform consumer app it is usually higher than sellers claim.
| Line | Realistic cost |
|---|---|
| Product and interface design | $3,000 |
| Build, both platforms, from an existing cross-platform base | $14,000 |
| Backend, accounts, storage, notifications | $5,000 |
| Store listings, review cycles, screenshots, policy pages | $1,500 |
| Six months of calendar time before the first user exists | Not purchasable |
That totals $23,500 of build against an $18,000 asking price, which is the case for paying it. The line without a price is the one that decides most acquisitions in this band. You can buy the code at any time. You cannot buy back the six months, or the 12,000 people who already downloaded it.
What should move the price down?
Five things should pull your offer below the asking figure, and each is checkable in an afternoon:
- Actives falling month on month. A base shrinking 6% a month is worth roughly half the same base that is flat, because you are buying twelve months of decay before your first release.
- No account system. An app with no sign-in gives you no way to reach users, no email list and no migration path.
- Installs concentrated in one launch spike, with nothing since.
- A native rewrite needed for the platform version the store will require next.
- An SDK or API the app depends on that has changed terms or pricing.
Anonymous consumer users sit further from revenue than named business accounts. That is not a reason to avoid the deal, but it is a reason for the unit price to be lower.
What should move it up?
Organic install flow moves it up more than anything, because it is the one thing that keeps working while you build the paid tier. An app pulling 400 organic installs a month from store search has an acquisition channel attached, and an acquisition channel is worth more than the users it has already delivered. Established store rankings, a rated listing with several hundred reviews, and push notification opt-ins all carry over to you and none of them can be bought outright.
A base that already shows intent to pay is the strongest signal available. Users who hit a locked feature, or a waitlist that collected emails against a price, tell you something a download count never will.
What is the ceiling on a deal like this?
The ceiling is the point where the cash cannot come back inside three years on conservative assumptions. Work it backwards: 900 monthly actives converting at 3% is 27 paying users, and at $5 a month that is $1,620 a year. On those numbers $18,000 is an eleven-year payback and the deal only works if you grow the base or charge considerably more.
Run that calculation before you make an offer, not after. Add the transfer costs while you are there: the buyer bears the Escrow.com fee, which is 2.4% in the $5,000 to $50,000 tier, so $432 on an $18,000 transfer. If the arithmetic only works at the seller's most optimistic conversion rate, the answer is a lower offer rather than a longer spreadsheet.
Related: how-to-value-a-business-with-users-but-no-revenue, cost-per-user, monthly-active-users, due-diligence-on-a-pre-revenue-asset
See what a business at this level is listed at.
Everything on sale between $50,000 and $150,000, on the same fields.