Livate Post-mortem: €20 in Revenue, €480 in Infra, and What I Took Away
Alexandre
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Reading time: 7 min
Livate, 2025-2026
€20 in revenue over one year. €480 in infrastructure. Net margin: -€460. Livate is no longer on the App Store.
The problem wasn't patience, or marketing, or a missing feature. The problem was that I never found product-market fit (the alignment between what a product offers and what the market actually wants to pay for). And it took me ten months to admit it.
Here's the breakdown.
The numbers: €20 in revenue for €480 in infra
Livate has been on the App Store since May 2025. Over one year, the app generated roughly €20 in revenue against an infrastructure cost of €40 per month (Cloud Run, PostgreSQL, CDN), or €480 over the year. Annual margin: -€460. This isn't a business. It's a bill.
€20
revenue in 1 year
€480
infra cost / year
Metric
Value
Total revenue
~€20
Monthly infra cost
~€40 (Cloud Run, PostgreSQL, CDN)
Annual cost
~€480
Net margin
-€460
Product-market fit isn't there. The question is no longer whether the next feature will change everything. It's: do I keep injecting money into a product nobody is searching for?
What didn't work
Livate failed on three fronts simultaneously: a saturated market with no niche, catastrophic day-7 retention, and all my time spent coding instead of talking to users.
One evening in February, I opened App Store Connect. €20. I stared at it for a few seconds, closed the tab, and went to bed. No decoding required. I had understood.
For months I'd been telling myself the traffic would come. That the next feature would change everything. That I just needed patience. That night, I stopped telling myself that.
The productivity app market is saturated. Over 40,000 apps in the Productivity category on the App Store alone. Notion, Todoist, Things, Habitica, Streaks: all of them have years of head start, teams, budgets. But the real problem wasn't the competition itself. It was the absence of an answer to a simple question: why would a user choose Livate over Todoist they already use? If I didn't have a convincing answer, neither did they.
Conversion was nearly nonexistent. Downloads, yes. But day-7 retention was catastrophic, and premium conversions could be counted on one hand over the entire year. The funnel was probably broken from day one: people who downloaded the app didn't actually have the problem Livate was meant to solve. Or that problem wasn't painful enough to justify adopting yet another productivity tool.
I misallocated my time. Dev, design, marketing, support, infra. Alone on all of it. Every trade-off costs you. I spent weeks optimizing the cache-first layer and the Dynamic Island, technical details I loved, while nobody was telling me whether the concept actually resonated. I should have done the opposite: talk to users first, code second. I touched on this in my story in a few words.
Building Livate for "everyone who wants to be more productive" means, in practice, nobody in particular. €460 to learn that is the price of tuition.
The real learning: ASO as the adjacent problem
While building Livate, I spent more time understanding the App Store than coding features. Why certain keywords convert and others don't, how rankings evolve, what patterns distinguish top-charting apps. That accidental knowledge became more interesting than the app itself.
ASO (App Store Optimization, the set of techniques for improving an app's visibility in App Store search results, the equivalent of SEO for the web) is a very concrete subject when you're an indie dev. Why did my app rank for some keywords and not others? What were the conversion patterns of top-charting apps? How did competition in a category evolve week over week?
To answer those questions, I was using tools like Sensor Tower or AppFollow. Powerful tools, built for marketing teams with four-figure monthly budgets. Not for a solo indie dev trying to understand why their position on "daily habits iOS" dropped three spots this week.
I looked for an affordable alternative. Nothing good existed: either too simplistic, too expensive, or half-abandoned.
That gap is genuinely the thing that stayed with me most from the whole Livate journey. And that's where the idea came from.
What I'm building now
For Livate, I was imagining the need. For Koda, I lived it for ten months. For Waku, I am my own user. So what came next started from there.
Koda: App Store analytics for indie devs
The difference between Koda and Livate is that I am the target user. Not theoretically: I had this exact problem for ten months. I know what I was looking for, what existing tools failed to give me, and what I would have paid to have it.
Koda is an App Store analytics tool built for independent developers: ASO keyword tracking, competitor analysis, ranking history, category trends. A Sensor Tower alternative at a price that makes sense for solos, without the marketing dashboard designed for teams of ten.
It's also a fundamentally different model: I'm building a tool, not a consumer app. Something that solves a concrete professional problem. I had that problem. The people who will use it look exactly like who I was six months ago. Koda is in development. If you're struggling with ASO, you can join the waitlist.
Waku: still here, still in development
Waku took a different path from the start: 100% offline, no backend, no user account, no monthly infrastructure bill. The business model is simple, a one-time €4.99 purchase, and operating costs are close to zero. The exact opposite of Livate.
I wrote about the launch in this article. Waku is a visual PKM (Personal Knowledge Manager, a tool for capturing and organizing your knowledge) for iOS, built with Claude Code every day. The technical stack and dev workflow are covered in my breakdown of AI coding agent architecture.
The Productivity category on the App Store has over 40,000 apps. I dove in without a precise niche and without an existing audience. Essentially, I was swimming in a red ocean without seeing it.
Before launching an app in 2026, you need to spend time analyzing App Store search trends, watching what performs on TikTok and YouTube in your niche, reading competitor reviews to find what's genuinely missing. I didn't do that work. I coded instead.
Dev and architecture. Building Livate forced me to learn native Swift from scratch: MVVM, cache-first, widgets, Dynamic Island, Live Activities. A full stack, thought through end to end. All the technical details are in this article. None of it was acquired before I started.
ASO. I didn't know what it was. Today I understand how the App Store indexes apps, why some keywords convert and others don't, how to read category rankings. That knowledge is directly what Koda is built on.
Marketing. I launched without an audience. Zero community, zero anticipation, zero noise before launch day. I should have documented the project, shared the progress, built some traction before hitting publish. A painful realization when it comes after the fact.
Entrepreneurship. A solo project means learning to do everything at once: product, tech, marketing, support, accounting. Time management, prioritization, the ability to recognize when something isn't working and turn the page. None of that comes from a tutorial. It comes from failing.
Where Livate stands now
Livate is no longer available on the App Store. The app depends on a backend and database I can no longer maintain at a loss. Bringing it back would require a full refactor to run offline-first, without a server, following the same model as Waku. That's not the priority today.
The 3 things I'm taking away
1. Market first, code second
€20 in revenue for €480 in infra is not a patience problem. It's a product-market fit problem. Before you code, do the research: App Store trends, competitor reviews, signals on social. If you can't find a precise pain point nobody is solving, you're swimming upstream.
2. Build for yourself, not for an imaginary persona
The difference between Livate and Koda is that with Koda I lived the problem. Not theoretically. Every day for ten months. The best product-market fit is when you are your own first customer.
3. Code is genuinely the easiest part
A solo project means learning dev, ASO, marketing, and entrepreneurship at the same time. The weeks I spent optimizing the Dynamic Island should have been spent talking to users. Technical skill doesn't compensate for the absence of a market.
Conclusion: failures are where learning happens
With Livate, what I spent months learning involuntarily (ASO, rankings, the mechanics of App Store conversions) became more interesting than the app itself. Koda was born from that. Not from a plan. From an accidental obsession.
The blog posts stay live. My attention, my code, and my energy are now going into Koda and Waku. Code is genuinely the easiest part. The market, the audience, the timing: that's the real game.
Have you ever shut down a project? What made you pull the trigger? Send me a message on X, LinkedIn or leave a comment.
Alex
Key takeaways
€20 in revenue for €480 in infra over one year: that's not a patience problem, it's a product-market fit problem.
Over 40,000 apps in the Productivity category on the App Store. Without a precise niche or a pre-built audience, you're swimming upstream.
Before you code, do the research: App Store trends, competitor reviews, social signals. Market first, code second.
Koda was born directly from the problem I lived: a Sensor Tower alternative built for indie devs. The best product-market fit is when you are your own first customer.
A solo project means learning dev, ASO, marketing, and entrepreneurship at the same time. Writing the code is the easiest part.
