Your apps made money last month. Which one actually made profit?

If you run multiple apps, websites or paid services, your overall revenue might look good. But that doesn't necessarily mean every product is profitable. One product could be making good money while another quietly eats into those profits.

The problem is that the numbers are scattered across different places. App stores and payment providers show your payouts, ad platforms show your marketing spend, and AI or API providers send their bills separately. If you're sharing subscriptions, servers or API keys across multiple products, figuring out what each one actually earns becomes even harder.

You don't need a complicated finance tool to get a clearer picture. A simple spreadsheet, updated once a month, is a good place to start.

Setting up the sheet

Create one row for each product and use the following columns:

Column	What to include
Net payouts	The amount reported or paid by the store or payment provider after fees and refunds
Ads	Advertising spend for that particular product
AI and APIs	AI, API and other usage-based costs
Hosting and tools	Server costs, subscriptions and other product-related expenses
Shared costs	Your share of expenses used across multiple products
Profit	Net payouts minus all the expenses above

It's better to start with net payouts rather than trying to calculate payment processing fees yourself. Different platforms have different fee structures, and these can vary depending on the country, product type and payment programme. Using the payout figures saves you from having to work that all out manually.

Let's look at an example

The following figures are hypothetical, just to show how the calculation works.

Product	Net payouts	Ads	AI and APIs	Hosting and tools	Shared	Profit	Margin
App A	$620	$180	$40	$30	$20	$350	56%
App B	$410	$30	$240	$40	$20	$80	20%
Site C	$150	$0	$10	$25	$20	$95	63%
Total	$1,180	$210	$290	$95	$60	$525	44%

At first glance, things look pretty good. You're making $525 in profit from $1,180 in net payouts.

But look at the individual products.

App B brings in the second-highest amount, yet it's generating the least profit. The biggest reason is its AI and API spending.

This is the kind of thing that's easy to miss when you only look at your overall revenue.

You might want to review its pricing, introduce usage limits or switch to a more affordable model. Or perhaps App B is growing quickly, and the higher costs are justified for now.

The point isn't that every expensive product needs fixing. It's that you should know where your money is going before making that decision.

A few things that can make this difficult

The spreadsheet itself is simple. Getting the numbers right is where things can get a little tricky.

AI and API costs

If you're using the same API key across multiple products, your provider might show you just one combined bill. Where possible, use separate API keys or projects for each product.

If that's not an option, use available usage data to estimate each product's share. It doesn't have to be perfect, but make sure you document how you arrived at the numbers.

Shared expenses

What about a server, subscription or tool that you use across all your products?

You could divide the cost equally or allocate it based on each product's revenue. Neither method is necessarily perfect, but consistency matters more than finding the perfect formula.

Pick a method and stick with it. Otherwise, comparing one month with another becomes difficult.

Payment timing

App stores and payment providers don't always pay you in the same month that a customer makes a purchase.

You can track revenue based on when the sale happened or when the payout arrived. Either approach can work for a basic tracking sheet, but don't mix the two.

Different currencies

If your products earn money in different currencies, you'll need to convert them into a common currency before comparing them.

Where possible, use the amount that actually reached your account. If you need to convert currencies yourself, keep a note of the exchange rate used.

Annual subscriptions

A yearly subscription can make one month look unusually profitable, followed by several months with very little revenue.

That's fine if you're simply tracking cash received, but it doesn't necessarily reflect how the product is performing over time. Keep this in mind when comparing monthly results.

Taxes

Tax rules depend on where you operate, and this spreadsheet doesn't account for them. Think of the profit figure as a basic operating estimate, not your actual taxable profit.

What should you look for?

Once you've tracked things for two or three months, start comparing the results.

Here are a few things worth paying attention to:

• Rising expenses: Is a product's spending increasing faster than its payouts?
• Missed opportunities: Is there a product with a healthy profit margin that you're barely giving any attention to?
• Unproductive ad spend: Are you spending more on advertising than the profit you're getting back?
• Unexpected results: Is the product you've been spending most of your time on actually performing as well as you thought?

You could also add another column for the number of hours you spend maintaining each product.

It's only an estimate, but comparing profit against the time invested can sometimes tell you more than revenue alone.

I'd like to hear from other developers and indie makers

A little about me: I'm a software developer, and most of my previous projects have been charity-based. I haven't personally managed a portfolio of commercial products, so I haven't used this spreadsheet to track my own earnings.

I started putting these ideas together while researching a product concept called ProfitLayer. It's still just a concept, and I'm trying to understand whether this is actually a problem worth solving.

Maybe a simple spreadsheet is all most people need. Or perhaps managing revenue and expenses across multiple products is more complicated than that.

That's something I'd genuinely like to understand from people who have been through it.

If you run two or more revenue-generating products, do you track profit separately for each one? And have those numbers ever influenced a business decision you made?

I'd love to hear about your experience in the comments.

If you'd prefer to share your thoughts privately, I've also put together a short survey that takes around five minutes.

It doesn't ask for your name or email, and there's nothing to buy or sign up for. The survey is intended for people who earn money from at least two products.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Comments

[Alex Shev]

Separating per-product usage costs from shared costs is the part that makes this useful rather than another revenue dashboard. I would keep the allocation rule in its own dated tab or note, so a change from equal split to usage-based allocation does not masquerade as a margin improvement. For AI-heavy products, tracking contribution margin before shared costs is also helpful: it shows whether more usage is creating value or simply scaling a loss.