By Chrissy Giglio, tech writer at Fueled, a leading iPhone application developer agency based in NYC’s SoHo district.
If you haven’t heard of the ultra popular app, AppGratis, then you are missing out. This recommendation machine will hook you up with some of the coolest apps for your mobile device. The best part? It’s all for free. If you’re not up to date on what’s available in your app store, then this gem of a tool will make your tech life a bit more simple.
The breakdown of this genius tool is that everyday a different app is featured. For 24 hours, that app (that normally has to be downloaded for a fee) will be offered to you for free. If you’re interested in the showcased app, you can download it and check it out. If you have no interest, you can pass and wait for the next day to see what’s going to be on the AppGratis pedestal.
You may also be confused about how AppGratis is making money by giving away apps for free. When big companies are giving their apps away, they pay AppGratis for each time their app is downloaded. For smaller companies, the said company and AppGratis generally split the money that is coming in from advertisements and digital downloads. The reason why these companies are ok with giving their apps away for free for 24 hours is because the number of downloads increases substantial amounts (it’s possible to reach 500,000 downloads in the day), which is the exposure they are aiming for.
Now that the essentials of the app are explained, here’s where things become even more interesting. Over seven million people globally have this app on their device. In the month of December 2012 alone they raked in a million dollars in revenue. You may be thinking that there’s no way that this giant could expand anymore, but this is where you’re wrong. They have recently received some generous funding, $13.5 million to be exact, from Europe’s Iris Capital, along with the Orange Publicis Fund.
This extra funding that they now have access to will allow the company to double its number of employees, as well as breaking into new markets around the world. AppGratis founder, Simon Dawalt, founded the company in France and then started targeting small regional markets and then later expanding to the US market.
Just so you can wrap your head around exactly what that means- since it’s birth three years ago, AppGratis currently has about 40 employees and has made $14.5 million in revenue from about 30 marketplaces around the world. Out of the millions of users who have AppGratis on their device, approximately one million of them open up the app everyday. Of the people that actually open the app, anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of them will download the free app of the day.
With the additional funding that’s been added to their bank account, they will be able to reach new and exciting extremes. Will this powerful device be slowed down anytime soon? We’ll wait and see, but for now we’re happily surprised by their success and growth.
