5 weird apps making $50K/mo you never heard of

Welcome to Breadcrumb, where we bring you stories on how regular people build profitable apps with AI.

📖 Today's story

Today I want to show you five apps that sound like a joke when you first hear them. But some make $25K/month to $50K/month.

To my surprise, some of these were only launched earlier this year and the youngest founder was 20 years old.

I picked these five because these are not complicated apps. They each take one small annoying problem that a specific group of people already has, and they sell the fix.

1. Erly

WHO

Jake Glacer, 24 yrs old

WHAT

An alarm that won't turn off until you finish a task

REVENUE

Over $50,000 a month

Jake taught himself to code while working an accounting job, and the app he ended up building is almost embarrassingly simple. You set an alarm. When it goes off, you can't just tap snooze. You have to finish a mission first, and the app watches through your camera to make sure you actually did it.

The mission can be push-ups, solving a math problem, or taking a photo of something outside your bed. Until you do it, the noise keeps going.

He launched at the end of 2025 and went from nothing to over $50,000 a month in about four months.

The way he grew it is worth stealing too. He paid TikTok and Instagram creators who already make “day in my life” videos to work the app into a normal morning routine clip, and he paid based on guaranteed views rather than a flat fee per post.

2. GoTall

WHO

Chenglin, who launched GoTall when he was 20 yrs old.

WHAT

Predicts how tall you'll grow up to be, then coaches you to get there

REVENUE

A verified $56,670 a month

You're a teenager, you're worried about your height, and this app looks at your age, your parents' height, how far into puberty you are, and your sleep and eating habits, then tells you the number it thinks you'll hit as an adult.

Apparently, that's a scary and fascinating question when you're 15, and millions of people type some version of it into Google every month. He saw the demand for it and just turned it into an app.

That prediction is the hook, but the money is in what comes next. Once it gives you a prediction, it sells you a plan to chase it, with tracking for sleep, food, exercise and posture, plus small daily challenges you tick off. Genius right.

And people really are paying. TrustMRR, which reads the app's actual payment data through a connected Superwall account, shows around $56,670 a month with over 16,000 active subscriptions, and about $774,000 collected in its first year.

Here's the part that shocked me. The app charges as little as $1.99 in some countries, and it still lands in the top grossing charts in places like Bangladesh and Uganda. He priced it so a kid almost anywhere could afford it, and the sheer number of them did the rest.

The idea you can copy: start with a question people are dying to know the answer to, hand them a number, then sell the plan to change that number. The same move works for how well you'll age, how fast you could run, how your baby is growing, or how big your puppy will get.

3. ToneAdapt

WHO

Kyan, 21, a computer science student in San Diego

WHAT

Tells guitarists exactly how to set up their gear to sound like a specific song

REVENUE

Over $20,000 in four weeks

Kyan had only been playing guitar for about a year and a half when he ran into the problem himself. You hear a song, you want your guitar to sound like that, and every answer online assumes you own the same amp and pedals as the person who recorded it.

So he built the thing that fixes that. You tell the app what guitar, amp and pedals you actually own, you pick a song, and it hands you the settings for your gear.

He built the first version in about a week over Thanksgiving break. In the four weeks before his interview he brought in around $11,500 through the website and around $14,000 through the mobile app. The site now says over 150,000 guitarists have used it.

His growth came from posting three times a day across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook until he found the video formats that converted, then paying creators to make more of those.

The verticals you can apply to: Do that for camera settings, espresso machines, 3D printers, sewing machines, etc.

4. Cardstock

WHO

Kyle Fowler, a self-taught iPhone developer

WHAT

Scans a sports card and tells you what it's worth

REVENUE

Around $75,000 a month

Kyle started building this in 2019 with two friends, and it took about six months to finish. You hold your phone over a trading card, and the app works out which card it is, checks what that card has actually been selling for on eBay, and adds it to your collection with a running total of what the whole stack is worth.

Collectors have boxes of these things and no idea what's in them. The app turns “what is this” into a number in a couple of seconds.

He says it does around $75,000 a month, with roughly 15,000 people paying and about 13,000 downloads a month. Plans start at $4.99 a month, and the App Store shows 4.5 stars from around 11,000 ratings.

His first users came from one Reddit post in a card collecting community when he finished the build. Years later he grew it again with simple slideshow videos on TikTok made by creators.

5. Talefy

WHAT

An AI story game where you can type any move and the story keeps going

REVENUE

A verified $25,535 a month

Think of a choose-your-own-adventure book, except you're not stuck with the three options someone printed on the page. In Talefy you type whatever you want your character to do, and the AI writes the next part of the story around your choice on the spot.

You can play stories other people made, or build your own characters and worlds, so the app never really runs out of things to do. Fans have made over 200 different kinds of stories to jump into.

It pulls in a verified $25,535 a month, checked by TrustMRR straight through the app's connected Stripe account and last looked at on July 20, 2026. It has been running since 2023 and has quietly collected close to $896,000 over its life.

Here's the number that stopped me. All of that comes from only about 864 paying subscribers. That works out to roughly $30 a month from each one, which tells you how much people will pay for a story that feels written just for them.

The shape you can copy: let the AI make the content, let the reader steer it, save their progress so they come back, and charge a monthly fee. The same idea could work for mystery games, practicing a new language, bedtime stories for kids.

💡 Key takeaways

Hit reply and tell me which one’s your favorite?

I hope you enjoyed today's issue.

See you next week,
Jason Lee