Home / Circle Story

You built a useful app.
Then the bills showed up.

Every single one of these layers — we lived them. The store fees. The ad spend. The agency that promised everything and handed us a maze. The tools that just kept stacking up, month after month.

We didn't write this page to sell you something. We wrote it because the pain is real — and nobody talks about it.

What happens next

Every app has a toll booth waiting for it.

The moment you put an app out there, a line forms. App stores. Ad agencies. SEO firms. Email tools. AI subscriptions. Analytics platforms. Each one promises it's necessary. Each one takes a piece.

By the time they're all paid, the product disappears behind the machinery built around it.

Read the full story in Little App, Big Store or Old vs New — then move the slider below and see the real numbers for yourself.

The math

Move the slider. Watch where the money goes.

Start at $2. Every cost shown is a real service sold to app developers. See how much is left for the person who built it.

$2.00
App price
$2.00
What the customer pays — move the slider to change it.
Ecosystem cost per sale
Per customer — what stores, agencies, and tools take from each sale before the builder sees a penny.
Net per sale
Per customer — what's actually left for the builder after every middleman is paid on that one sale.
Break-even price
The minimum price per customer the app would need to charge just to stop losing money.
Store commission In-store machine Google paid + SEO External ecosystem Developer Break-even line

* Per-unit costs amortized at ~500 units/month. Every layer shown is a real service actively sold to app developers as necessary. Google paid ads are included in the old-way model. Circle uses neither paid search nor third-party acquisition.

What we do differently

Circle apps skip the middlemen.
Stripe takes a small cut. That's it.

No app store. No ad spend. No agency maze. Just the product and the person who needs it.

We found a way to keep our app infrastructure as low as possible and still give you quality — without exposing your data to anyone.

The old way

App price$2.00
Ecosystem takes
Loss per sale

Break-even at

The Circle way

App price$2.00
Stripe cost
App infrastructure-$0.80
Profit

That's it.

That's how we keep the price low and still make it worth building.

Start here

Pick the tool you need.
Use it. Done.

No subscription traps. No tracking. Open it, handle the thing, move on.