Less tool sprawl on the P&L. More revenue you can attribute.
You approve the growth budget, and nobody can tell you what any given line of it returned. Eight to fifteen tools, an agency retainer, an AI pilot or two — invoices precise to the cent, outcomes described in adjectives. AppDNA is built on the opposite contract: one line item, one pricing driver, and a system where every shipped change carries its own measured lift. The agents watch your funnel, diagnose, and draft the improvements; a named person on your team approves each one; the result lands in an audit trail your next budget review can query.
AppDNA is the App Growth OS for subscription apps; for finance leaders it is the consolidation of the growth stack into one line item priced on paying subscribers — no per-seat and no per-event meters — at $149 a month plus $1.49 for each paying subscriber above the first 100, and that attributes its own impact: every change ships as a controlled experiment with a concurrent control group, a guarded KPI, and a full audit trail.
Five things wrong with the growth budget — and what replaces each one.
What it costs, in the only units that matter
the whole invoice is $149 a month plus $1.49 for each paying subscriber above your first 100 — published, not a special quote, and computable to the dollar from a forecast you already produce. The rate is flat rather than graduated, so it does not taper as you scale; what changes is what you are comparing it against, which is the next paragraph.
acquiring a paying subscriber typically costs $30–150 (industry ranges). Industry research (Harvard Business Review) puts acquiring a new customer at roughly 5–25× the cost of retaining one — and retention and monetization are precisely what this system ships. Retention is acquisition at a 90% discount; that's the math we run on.
the comparison that matters is not another tool, it is the team you would otherwise hire. A full in-house growth function is six to ten people at $900K to $1.5M a year, fixed from the day the offers are signed and unchanged in the quarter the app stalls. At 10,000 paying subscribers AppDNA runs about $179K a year — close to one hire, for the function this page describes.
The acquisition check (illustrative math from published pricing and industry CPA ranges — never a promised result): $1.49 a month is $17.88 a year to keep and grow a subscriber you paid $30 to $150 to acquire. We bill in the same unit your acquisition budget already runs on, at a fraction of what that unit already costs you — and unlike a salary, the line falls if the subscriber base does. Run it on your own numbers.
A line item that behaves in a forecast
- there is one plan at $149/mo, so there are no MAU bands to cross — no back-billing, no penalty for growing.
- counts only paying subscribers the SDK serves that month. Free users cost nothing; the first 100 paying users each month cost nothing; above that it is a flat $1.49 per paying user — 2,500 paying users costs about $3,576 on the meter, $3,725 including the platform fee.
- per-event fees, setup fees, integration charges, paid support tiers. Every possible charge is printed on /pricing.
- AI costs, bounded: every plan includes an AI allowance sized so normal operation never touches it; top-ups are fixed-price packs; auto-mode requires hard cost caps you set. The AI line cannot surprise you, structurally.
the line item moves on one number you already project — paying subscribers — it is derivable to the dollar from your own forecast, and it falls if that forecast does. It budgets like infrastructure, not like marketing, and it carries none of a payroll's downward rigidity.
What the current stack actually costs — all-in
The honest comparison isn't AppDNA versus zero; it's AppDNA versus what you're already paying: 8–15 tool subscriptions (several per-event or per-seat), an agency retainer at $10–50K/mo (typical), and the coordination time of the people stitching it together. Typical stack-plus-team setups run $600K–$1.6M/yr against AppDNA plus 1–2 people — typical/illustrative figures; assumes published pricing; your numbers will differ. The point isn't a savings promise. It's that the current spend has never been added up in one place — and once it is, the conversation changes.
Add yours up in three minutes → Growth Stack Cost Calculator /tools/growth-stack-cost-calculator — tools, agency, headcount, itemized. (Email-gated for the breakdown; no call required.)
Consolidation is an outcome, not a precondition — AppDNA reads your existing stack from day one, zero migration, so nothing gets ripped out or written off. You retire subscriptions at their renewals, one defensible decision at a time.
Why not just keep what we have?
Fair default — each tool in your stack is genuinely good at its slice, and the stack got the company this far. The comparison worth making is on the four properties a budget owner actually needs:
| The current stack | AppDNA | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Per-seat and per-event fees across 8–15 tools, each renewing separately, each priced to grow faster than your revenue | One plan: $149/mo plus $1.49 per paying subscriber above the first 100 — a fraction of one growth hire, and it falls if your subscriber base does |
| What you can attribute | Every platform grades its own homework; nobody owns the blended number | Per-experiment measured lift against concurrent controls, audit-logged — the line item produces its own ROI evidence |
| What it ships | Data and recommendations; execution waits in the engineering queue, where it competes with roadmap | Changes live in minutes after a named approver says yes — no release, no ticket, no waiting |
| What compounds | Knowledge scattered across tools, decks, and an agency's account manager | Growth Memory: every experiment, outcome, and decision in your workspace — exportable, and it never resigns |
Keep whatever earns its renewal. The difference is you'll finally have the number that decides.
Complete on its own. Compatible with everything you already run.
RevenueCat · Adapty · Firebase · AppsFlyer · Adjust · Amplitude · Mixpanel · Braze · OneSignal
Zero migration, zero write-offs: AppDNA reads billing and events from the stack you've already paid for — consolidation happens at renewals, on your calendar.
A note from the founder
Due diligence, free — before a dollar moves.
Paste your App Store or Google Play link. In about 2 minutes: a Growth Score (0–100), scores across all nine modules, the biggest revenue leak in the funnel, and a 90-day plan. It's a real diagnostic your growth team can be asked hard questions about — a useful internal document for the next budget conversation, whether or not anyone ever buys anything.
FAQ
Eight questions finance leads ask us — usually with the invoice structure open on the other screen.
01What stops the system from shipping something that damages revenue mid-quarter?
It can't ship without a named approver on your team — the agents watch, diagnose, and draft; a human says yes. When something does ship, it launches at 10% of traffic with a stop-loss on the revenue metrics you guard: anything that degrades is withdrawn automatically and logged. Think of it as a stop-loss on the P&L metric, enforced in software — bounded downside by construction, not by promise.
02Do we have to write off existing tool contracts to adopt this?
No — zero migration. AppDNA reads from RevenueCat, Adapty, Firebase, AppsFlyer and the rest on day one, so every contract runs its term. It's complete on its own, which means each renewal becomes a genuine decision instead of a hostage situation — the Stack Cost Calculator shows which renewals to question first.
03Engineering time is our most expensive line. What does this consume?
About an hour, once, for the SDK install. After that, growth changes ship with zero App Store releases — and the growth-ticket load engineering carries today (paywall changes, experiment builds, rollback releases) goes away with it. The net engineering effect is negative cost.
04Our revenue and subscriber data would be in this system. Who can see it?
Only you. Workspace isolation is enforced in code, not policy; your data never trains a shared model and is never visible to another customer. Anonymized market patterns flow in to sharpen your recommendations — nothing identifiable ever flows out. Where requirements are stricter, dedicated single-tenant deployment is available as a scoped engagement.
05What should we actually budget at our size?
Published and computable: $149/mo plus $1.49 for each paying subscriber above the first 100, so the number comes straight off your own subscriber forecast. The rate is flat rather than graduated, so budget roughly $1.49 per paying user per month once you are past the free allowance — it does not taper as you scale. There are no bands to cross and no back-billing. Honest exclusion: pre-launch apps with no live monetization funnel should start with the free audit and the content, not a subscription.
06What are the exit terms if it doesn't perform?
Self-serve is month-to-month — cancel any time, export everything: strategies, experiment history with its measured results, Growth Memory. Managed engagements carry the Service Continuity guarantee in the contract — your scope gets delivered, period: if the system ever falls short of agreed standards, we deliver the same work by hand, at the same price, until it doesn't have to. And the free audit means you saw the plan before anything was spent.
07How do we budget the usage (MTPU) line without surprises?
From your own subscriber forecast: the meter counts only paying subscribers the SDK serves that month — the first 100 are free, then $1.49 each, so 2,500 paying users runs about $3,576 on the meter, or $3,725 a month including the platform fee. It's forecastable to the dollar from numbers you already project. Note the rate is flat, not graduated: the per-user cost stays the same as you grow rather than falling. On capitalization: whether any of this is capex is a question for your accountants, not a vendor's marketing page — we'll provide whatever invoice detail they need, and that's as far as we should go.
08Can we lock pricing — annual terms, price protection?
There is no annual prepay today — billing is monthly and fully rolling, because the meter follows paying subscribers month to month. There are no bands to cross, so nothing is ever prorated or back-billed; and where customers signed on earlier published terms, those terms have been honored for their period, in writing. Every possible charge is printed on /pricing — if a line item ever appears that isn't, forward it and we'll be as confused as you.
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