The app looks like it is from 5 years ago, but a very nice project anyway. How often do users with smart home lights use the app and how often do you use the app?
In other words is it worth it or is it just a nerdy thing, which is nice but not really needed.
Guess you have no idea with what apps you can make money :)
If you have a decent app and good pricing you can convert something between 1-5% of downloads to paying customers. With his audience and reach he can easily make real money. Probably not life changing, but still a few hundred bucks each month.
He said on a podcast that he spent "6 months" developing it. I very much doubt that was 6 months of full-time work, but even if that was only 10 hours a week, and even if the "cost" was let's say $100 (probably much more) an hour, that's around $25k or 7 straight years of $300 a month (that never goes down for 7 years, aka impossible) to recoup his investment. That's an absolute low end, I think you could easily argue the cost was 4x that, which means it would take 28 years of sales that never dip to break even.
There's no possible way he could make anything besides less-than-nothing level money at $300 a month or anything close to that amount.
As he explained on his podcast, this project was designed to solve his own problem. The problem with apps designed to solve your own problem is that very often, your problem is not 1) shared by others willing to pay or 2) you don't solve the problem in the same way others want to solve a problem.
Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment.
And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.
He spends maybe 1% of the time talking about his apps, that really isn’t the reason.
And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is just for fun. Or one that has some sort of chance of making it really really big. Obviously up to him, but still, hard to understand.
Programming is a hobby for him. He’s also not traveling. He has two small non Covid vaccine eligible kids. Hardly any Indy app has a chance of making any money in todays App Store.
I'm pretty sure the content stopped in mid 2020, so a year or so after the sale.
And then eventually was redirected to DigitalOcean.
Also, just to add my own thought to this - CSS-Tricks is of course very loved by people who learned things there, and people who respect Chris Coyer as a designer. But, these acquisitions do have an effect on how people perceive a project, and skepticism is very high on that list.
They seem to be keeping the "Write for Us" option open, with 300$+ a pop per guest post + promotion to your project. If anything, it will become a haven for those kind of posts. If not, they might by some miracle find a really good person (dev or designer) who is willing to take on the reigns for a while. Unlikely, though.
