“For the first couple of years I started to monetize using banner ads — it was making around $8,000 a month. But then the pandemic hit and suddenly my ad revenue just disappeared. I knew I needed to pivot quickly. I rebuilt the app with subscriptions in mind, with premium features that would entice people to pay on an annual basis.”

Pandemic forced an ads-to-subscriptions pivot — that is where the real money was

Ad revenue on a commuter app evaporated overnight in March 2020. The forced rebuild around annual subscriptions plus A/B-tested paywalls is what produced the $30K/mo business. Lesson for bootstrappers: ad-supported single-app revenue is fragile to one black-swan event; subscription pricing is what compounds. The crisis was the gift.