Figures
How much work goes into a free app? We counted.
25 free apps · read on September 21, 2026 · repos re-read every night · the method · JSON
The sample is still small: 25 apps. Medians will move. That is why every figure comes with its count.
103days with commits behind an app, at the medianquartiles 32 – 138 · max 377
6 mobetween first and last commit, at the median16 weeks in a row at best
92 %have fewer than 20 GitHub stars23 of 25 · median ★ 2
2,553verified days of work, all apps together19,225 commits
What it says
- 52% of apps have passed 100 days with commits (13 of 25).
- 60% have a single human author in their history (15 of 25).
- 5 apps are over a year old and still getting commits. See them
- A day of work is 6.6 commits at the median.
- 3 of 8 Mac apps are on the App Store or notarized, according to their repo. See them
Which day they work
27% of work days fall on a Saturday or a Sunday. If work were spread at random, it would be 29%.
1,612 active days over the last 365 days, 19 public repos, dates in UTC. Private repos are left out: their older days are only known to the week.
By platform
| apps | days, median | months, median | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mac | 8 | 111 | 7 |
| CLI | 6 | 102 | 7 |
| iOS | 5 | 114 | 6 |
| Web | 3 | 71 | 5 |
By language
| apps | days, median | months, median | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swift | 11 | 114 | 6 |
| Rust | 5 | 112 | 11 |
| TypeScript | 4 | 99 | 6 |
A group with fewer than 3 apps is not shown: it would not be a statistic, it would be a card.
To quote
These figures are free to reuse (CC BY 4.0): a link to this page is enough. A sentence ready to paste:
On Not a Cent, a free app made by an indie represents a median of 103 days with commits spread over 6 months (25 apps, read on September 21, 2026). Source: https://notacent.app/en/chiffres
What these figures do not say
- This is not a sample of all indie apps: these are the ones listed here, free, with a GitHub repo, found by us or listed by their maker. Apps that last, by construction.
- A day with commits is not an eight-hour day. It is a day when someone opened the project and left something in it.
- Medians are recomputed every night: the figure you quote today will have moved in a month. Give the date.