No Ads, No Funnels, No Black Friday: How Lunar Quietly Makes $7K/Month
The story of Lunar, the monitor brightness app that started as a free Product Hunt launch and now sustains its creator full-time, with a $50 server bill and zero employees.
Alin Panaitiu didnāt set out to build a business. He just wanted his monitor to stop blinding him on sunny afternoons. What started as a personal fix became Lunar, a macOS app now pulling in $7,000 a month, built and run entirely by one person from Romania.
Why it matters: ā The most defensible products solve a problem the founder lives with every day
Worth your time if: ā Youāre a builder who hates selling and wonders if ājust shippingā is enough
The thing to steal: ā Let your users price your product, theyāll tell you what itās worth if you ask
Before we get started, who are you and what's the app you've built?
Hey, glad to be here! Iām Alin Panaitiu, a 31 year old š·š“ Romanian software developer, with a little obsession about inventing things and making little software utilities.
Nowadays I build macOS apps at The low-tech guys, write blog posts on my personal website and dabble in music writing and wood carving (working in front of a screen all day is tiring, I need to keep my sanity somehow).
Iām the sole creator and developer of š Lunar, a macOS app that can control the hardware brightness of external monitors, and can actually sustain me financially. At the moment, Lunar brings enough revenue for me to be able to take months of break away from my laptop.
I donāt really do that though, my mind always cooks up some idea and Iām back to writing code sooner or later.
Every good indie story has an origin moment. What was the spark that pushed you to actually sit down and start building Lunar?
It was the summer of 2017, new job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen.
I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light. That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came.
If you ever used an external monitor, you know how cumbersome it is to adjust the brightness constantly using its physical buttons or touch controls. And macOS doesnāt provide any way to change the brightness from the Macbook, unless you use something expensive like an Ultrafine.
So I started working on an app to automatically adjust the brightness based on the sun position in the sky.
After finding a cool (and totally ungooglable) name, and after 6 months of trial and error with creating a proper macOS UI, I finally took the plunge and launched Lunar on Product Hunt.
I launched it as a completely free product as I only saw it as a personal project and didnāt think that anyone would pay for such a thing. After all, I thought, Iām probably the only MacBook user that finds pressing monitor buttons hard.
It didnāt get much traction, probably because I didnāt explain well what problem it solves. But a few people liked it, and that made me happy :)
A first Product Hunt launch with only 17 votes could easily kill the motivation. How did Lunar keep growing from there, and what did those early users teach you?
Even though the first Product Hunt launch only got 17 votes, somehow, more and more people were finding out about Lunar.
I made a good choice to include a āBuy Me a Coffeeā button and a way to contact me in the app menu, as this lead to me understanding what other people have this problem as well.
Some users even requested functionalities that are now the most important features in Lunar.
These include Sync Mode (syncs the built-in MacBook display brightness to external monitors) or Media Keys (use the same brightness keys on the keyboard to also control external monitors).
I continued to read user emails, write down feature requests, code them as well as I can, and release free updates as fast as I was able to. I did two more Product Hunt launches on v2 and v3 which brought in hundreds of users.
To be honest, this was the only marketing I did. Iām a ābuilderā, not a salesman, I built a one-page website with an image and a download button, and just posted the link to that on the only website I knew to list product launches.
The arrival of Apple Silicon broke Lunar overnight. How did that moment end up being the turning point that pushed you to go full-time and finally charge for the app?
When the first M1 MacBook was launched, Lunar was no longer able to control monitor brightness because of the completely different hardware. There were so many people contacting me about this problem suddenly, that I had to do a reality check. I was still writing code for companies, and neglecting my own app while people clearly had a need for it.
Thatās when I decided to quit my job, surpass the challenge that Apple Silicon created, make Lunar great again, and, why not, ask money for it!
Up until this point, the app was completely free and open-source, so I had no idea how much was it worth. I created a Google Forms poll with price tiers ranging from $5 to $50 and asked existing users what would be a fair price. The median result was $23, so I went with that exact price forward, which remains to this day the only price for a lifetime license.
Soon after quitting my job (about 2 months of 12-hour workdays later), I released Lunar Pro v4, the first paid version. Existing users got the automatic update, and many bought the license immediately, to my complete amazement.
From the start, I was making a minimum of $3500/month, and even though it was less than half of my salary, I was more fulfilled than I ever been in my previous 7 years of working for companies.
Once Lunar was paid, building a great app wasn't enough on its own. What channels actually moved the needle for you, and which ones turned out to be a waste of money?
Even though I continued working tirelessly for the next 2 years, simply making a good app wasnāt enough to bring in new users. I started spreading the word about it, but in the same ābuilderā manner:
I frequently read Hacker News and comment about Lunar where itās relevant. Although I have a personal rule to only do this if I can bring something more to the discussion, not just a link to my app. People donāt like āshameless plugsā if thatās the only thing you do, day after day.
I found Reddit to also be a good place to share big updates and promos, /r/macapps is filled with people eager to know more about your macOS app (and roast you about it with every chance). Twitter and Facebook are very bad channels for people like me that donāt like posting daily, so I avoid that nowadays.
My own blog posts are also bringing interested people. My most interesting posts, like the one about the M1 technical challenges, can get up to 30k views on the days it peaks on Hacker News, lobste.rs, Twitter etc. Of those people, some of them are so invested in the problem that Lunar solves, that they also email me with very good quality feedback and feature requests.
I also tried conventional paid ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. but they are a money sinkhole for the niche that Lunar fills. Never got any sale from that, thousands of dollars down the drain, that was an expensive lesson.
You've stuck with a $23 lifetime license and skipped subscriptions and seasonal promos. How does the business actually work today?
Lunar makes all the money from one-time purchases of lifetime licenses. And itās all customer centered, never sold any volume license to businesses. Got close to do it about 3 times, if I remember correctly.
I had been asked for business license offers from Google, Meta and Epic Games, but after signing all the documents, the communication stopped abruptly ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Iām still selling lifetime licenses for $23, and rarely do promos if Iām in the mood. I donāt chase the Black Fridays, Blue Mondays, White Christmases and whatever seasonal excuse companies find to ram more products into peopleās hands. I actually tried once, but felt dirty doing it.
Iāve been expanding my portfolio of apps for the last year with āThe low-tech guysā, because my brain keeps cooking ideas, but also because I can never know when Apple decides to make Lunar obsolete with a platform update.
Let's talk numbers. Which are your current numbers?
Checking my Paddle dashboard, it looks like Iām averaging $7k/month just on Lunar. I make about $1k more on the other apps I have published on App Store.
This is currently rising because Iām working on my new app š Clop which will have the same business model as Lunar and there seems to be a lot of interest for it.
The cost of running this is quite minimal:
$50/month for a bare-metal Hetzner machine where I run all my servers (for file downloads, websites etc.)
$10/month for an IP geolocation service (Lunar needs coordinates to compute the sun position in the sky)
$20/year for the domains
$100/year for the Apple Developer membership which gives me a signing certificate and access to publishing on the App Store
The sales/VAT and government taxes take quite a big chunk of that, at least 35% of the revenue is spent on taxes. But Iām left with enough to live comfortably in Romania.
And I think thatās it.
Before we wrap, where can readers go to follow your work and try the apps?
Lunar app: https://lunar.fyi/
Personal website: https://alinpanaitiu.com
The low-tech guys: https://lowtechguys.com/