Finance, by the numbers

Free is the default in finance apps, and it's not close. Out of 38,529 tracked apps, 36,950 ask for nothing up front, while just 1,577 charge a price, splitting the category 95.9% free to 4.1% paid. That lopsided split tells you the money gets made after someone installs the app, not at the point of purchase. The paid slice breaks down into small, uneven bands: 466 apps priced $0.01 to $0.99, 521 in the $1 to $2.99 range, 247 between $3 and $4.99, 196 from $5 to $9.99, and 147 at $10 or above. No tier really pulls ahead of the others. Paid finance apps end up being a scattered handful of niche calculators and tools that get by just fine without asking anyone to subscribe.

Where apps get published and where ratings actually accumulate turn out to be separate stories. Darius Gudavicius has 97 apps to his name and 780 ratings combined, barely a dent in the category's 240,775,907 total ratings. Eran Malovani published 83 apps and sits at zero ratings. Euroland put out 61 apps and has 149 ratings. Excel Net Solutions Private Limited released 60 apps and picked up 277 ratings. Sami Sistemas Ltda also shipped 60 apps but has exactly one rating to show for it. MY UNISOFT published 58 apps and has none at all. Add up the top three publishers by volume and they still control less than 0.1% of all ratings in the category. Cranking out apps and actually earning people's trust are clearly two different games.

Now look at the apps people bother rating. Venmo alone has racked up 15,469,743 ratings. Capital One Mobile follows with 11,028,727. Wells Fargo Mobile® comes in at 10,721,176, Chase Mobile®: Bank & Invest at 9,453,814, Cash App at 8,660,263, Intuit Credit Karma at 7,718,770, Apple Wallet at 7,376,693, and PayPal - Pay, Send, Save at 6,298,500. Every single one of these deals with actual money changing hands, whether that's a bank balance or a transfer to a friend, and that's a different animal from some standalone calculator or currency converter. People rate the apps touching their cash week after week, not the ones gathering dust on a home screen for months.

Among the 21,342 apps that carry public ratings, the median comes out to 4.6 stars. 12,866 apps sit at 4.5 or better, and only 2,702 fall below 3.0. Once a finance app gets rated at all, it tends to rate well. Median download size lands at 51.5 MB, and the distribution backs that up: 18,676 apps stay under 50 MB, 17,469 fall between 50 and 200 MB, just 2,132 climb into the 200 to 500 MB range, and 252 cross the 500 MB mark. These apps aren't bloated. Most exist to do one thing, usually banking or budgeting, and none of that requires gigabytes of storage.

Maintenance looks solid on the surface. 30,226 of the 38,529 tracked apps pushed an update in the past 12 months, a clear majority. But only 21,342 of those same 38,529 apps have public ratings, which means a good chunk of that update effort is going toward apps nobody's actually reviewing, echoing what we already saw with publishers like Eran Malovani and MY UNISOFT.

If you're trying to pick a finance app, the numbers say go where the ratings already are. Venmo's 15,469,743 ratings and Cash App's 8,660,263 mostly reflect how much people use them, not necessarily how well they're built. Apps that move money get used constantly and reviewed constantly, which is a different kind of trust signal than a 4.6 median spread thin across 21,342 apps. As for paying $10 or more, only do it if the app solves something the free giants don't touch, since 147 apps out of 38,529 charging that much is a pretty clear sign most developers already decided that price point wasn't worth chasing.