His iPhone App Earns $40K/Month (Built With AI)

Rasty Turek used AI coding agents to build Vaultaire, an iPhone app for hiding private photos, videos and files, in about three weeks 🤖

It’s free to download, and people pay to unlock the Pro features.

It was his first iPhone app, but Rasty is no beginner: he was an engineer at Google and sold his last company in 2025.

👀 He planned to give Vaultaire away, then added a paywall at the last minute, hoping it would cut down on support and feature requests…

My monetization strategy was: “maybe if I charge them, they’ll leave me alone.”

It did $41K in App Store sales in August, before Apple’s cut 🤑

In July, a one-time $29.99 lifetime option brought in almost 80% of revenue.

Then…

I almost doubled the price, expecting conversion to fall enough to keep revenue roughly flat. Instead, sales volume barely changed and revenue essentially doubled overnight.

About 60% of downloads come from people searching the App Store, helped by translating the app into 30 other languages (Japan alone brought in thousands of dollars) 👀

Rasty’s angle was privacy: everything is encrypted on the phone, with no account needed and no servers holding anyone’s files.

Look for popular apps with poor reviews or an obvious weak spot, and use AI to build a better version.

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