I make $7,800/month testing mobile apps for 6 companies. My overhead is $860
I want to write this because when I was trying to figure out what to do after getting laid off I could not find anyone laying out the real economics of a solo service business. Not revenue or actual costs, hours, the take home after taxes. So here's mine down to the dollar
Six startups pay me a monthly retainer. Before they submit an app update I run all their user flows through automated tests and send a report showing what passed and what broke with screenshots for every step. They fix the broken stuff before anyone downloads it. Thats the whole service. But I didnt start here
I was a PM at a funded startup. Got cut with about 30% of the company in a restructure. Spent two months applying to PM roles and getting ghosted after final rounds. I needed money coming in so I started messaging everyone I knew on linkedin. Not pitching a service, just telling people I was available and asking if they knew anyone who needed product help. Most people said "ill keep you in mind" which means no. But three people actually came back with something. Two were one off strategy projects, one was a longer engagement helping a founder figure out their roadmap. None of it was stable. I was making about $4,500-5,000/month across whatever I could piece together but every engagement had a defined end date. No recurring anything. Every month I was basically reinterviewing for the next one
Five months in one of those linkedin conversations turned into a launch prep gig for a seed stage startup. Social fitness app, small team, about $1.2M raised. The founder needed someone to own the launch plan, the metrics framework, the app store listing, all the product side stuff his engineers didnt want to think about. Part of that was doing my own walkthrough of the app before submission to make sure everything worked from a user perspective. Two days before they were supposed to submit, the dev pushed a build and the signup flow was broken on any Android device with the font size set above default. He had tested on his Pixel with everything default. Worked fine for him. I caught it because I happened to be doing my walkthrough on a Samsung with the text bumped up. Pure luck
The founder asked if there was a way to prevent that from happening again. I spent a week trying to figure that out. Looked into appium first because thats what comes up when you google mobile test automation. I am not a developer. Three days in I still hadnt gotten a single test to actually run. The setup needs android SDK, java, specific environment variables, a bunch of dependencies that all have to be the exact right version or nothing works. Every tutorial assumed I already knew what a gradle build was. I dont. So that was a dead end
Then I looked at some of the newer no code testing tools and most of them still wanted me to identify elements in the app by their technical IDs which I also dont have access to because im not part of the engineering team and I dont touch the codebase. I almost gave up and just told the founder id do manual walkthroughs before every release which is basically what I was already doing for free as part of the consulting gig
Eventually I found something where I just type what should happen and it figures out the rest by looking at the screen. Thats what I use now and ill get into that but it let me write 25 test scenarios for that clients app in one afternoon and when I ran them against the broken build 4 of them failed with screenshots showing exactly where. I charged the founder $1,200/month to maintain those tests and run them before every release. He was already budgeting $3,500 for a part time QA contractor to do the same thing by hand so it was an easy yes.
That first client changed how I thought about the consulting work I was doing. I was still taking product strategy gigs on the side but the testing retainer was the only thing that paid me the same amount every month without me having to pitch anyone again. The founder mentioned what I was doing in a group chat with other YC founders and someone reached out. Thats how client 2 happened at $900/month. I didnt do any outreach for my first three clients, they all came through the first founder talking about it. By month 5 I had 4 clients at $4,400 and I stopped taking consulting gigs entirely because the retainer income was more predictable and the work took less time
It wasnt clean though. Month 4 I missed a real bug on one of the ecommerce clients because I had only written tests for the straight path through checkout. Didnt cover what happens when someone removes an item mid purchase and goes back. A customer found it before my tests did and that was a rough call with the founder. Rewrote his entire suite that weekend to cover the backwards paths and the skip ahead paths. Most of my suites now have more weird path flows than linear ones because thats where the real bugs hide. Month 6 one clients CTO pushed to replace me with an engineer writing coded scripts. I showed 14 bugs caught in 3 months and asked how long it would take to rebuild that coverage in appium. He said 6-8 weeks full time. They kept me
Current state is 6 clients between $900 and $1,600/month. Total $7,800. A couple came from twitter where I post about specific ways mobile apps break, not general testing advice. Things like how most onboarding tests use a fresh install every time but real users are upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4 with months of cached data and nobody tests that upgrade path. Founders read that and DM me. I offer to test their 5 most critical flows for free. Every trial has caught at least one real issue. After that the pricing conversation is short.
Costs. The platform runs about $150/month for a plan I need across 6 clients. It includes the devices and the test runs so theres no separate infrastructure to pay for. On top of that I pay about $95 for a real device subscription. Rest is maybe $40 in random stuff. Everything together comes to about $285 on a normal month, some months closer to $350 if I need extra test runs during a clients launch week.
Revenue $7,800. Costs about $350. Profit roughly $7,450. I set aside 30% for quarterly taxes and pay $380/month for health insurance which I didnt have for the first three months because I kept putting it off. Actual take home after taxes and insurance is about $4,800. Thats for maybe 25 hours a week. My consulting was paying about the same but with 3x hours and no idea where next months money was coming from
All my clients are funded startups between seed and series B. I charge based on complexity and platforms. $900 for a productivity app with 20 flows on one platform. $1,600 for a fintech app with 55 flows across iOS and Android where I need to test permission states and biometric fallbacks. Average is about $1,300. The sweet spot is teams with 5-15 engineers. Complex enough app to need real testing. Small enough that nobody on the team owns quality full time. Thats me now for $1,300/month instead of the $6-8k a junior QA hire would cost them
Zero churn in 9 months. Once the tests are catching stuff before releases nobody turns them off. The first time I catch something that would have shipped broken the conversation about whether they still need me just stops happening
For someone thinking about this you need to understand mobile apps well enough to know which flows matter and which edge cases break things. You need to be comfortable talking to founders about their product. And you need patience because writing test instructions that work reliably takes a couple months of getting it wrong first. That’s it.
Happy answer whatever u want to know about this. The pricing; setup details or any thing