I’m an indie developer and I recently shipped my first iOS app, PhotoCraft. It’s an AI-powered photo editor focused on enhancement, avatars, and creative edits.
This project started mainly as a way for me to learn how to take an idea all the way from development to passing App Store review and shipping something real. The hardest parts for me weren’t the models or the UI, but scope control, onboarding decisions, and dealing with review feedback.
A few things I learned along the way:
“Good enough to ship” is harder to define than expected
App Store rejections are more about clarity and UX than code
Cutting features early saved me a lot of time later
I’m sharing this mostly to get feedback from people who’ve built and shipped products before. I’d especially appreciate thoughts on:
First-time user experience
Whether the feature set feels focused or bloated
Monetization flow (what feels fair vs frustrating)
Happy to answer any questions about the build, tooling, or App Store review process.
Thanks for taking a look.
— Deva
Guestmodinfo•3w ago
1. What are the upfront cost that you need to pay the apple store for them to host your app?
2. Do you need to host your app on some server and connect it to app store. What are the cost of that?
devavinoth12•3w ago
The Apple Developer Program costs $99/year.
On the backend side, the app does use servers for AI processing, so there are ongoing costs depending on usage (compute + storage). I’ve kept the initial setup fairly lean while validating usage and trying to understand real demand before scaling anything aggressively.
One of my main goals with this project is to learn how to balance infrastructure costs with a consumer subscription model in a sustainable way.