Android app to send gallery photos to Snapchat as snaps. Built solo, monetized via subscription, $50K+ in worldwide gross sales before I sunset it.
Outcome
Took LiveSnaps from idea to a paying global user base, generating $50K+ in gross subscription revenue before discontinuing the service when the affiliate moment passed.
LiveSnaps was an Android app that let users send photos from their phone gallery to Snapchat as native snaps — bypassing a friction Snapchat itself didn't address. It hit a moment when the affiliate-marketing world was peaking on Snapchat, and people needed a way to reuse content without re-shooting it.
I built it solo, shipped it to the Play Store, monetized it with a subscription, and ran the whole loop — engineering, support, billing, refunds, growth. When the affiliate moment passed and Snapchat's own product changed, I made the call to discontinue rather than keep a flatlining service alive. That decision is part of the case study, not a footnote to it.
LiveSnaps generated $50K+ in gross subscription revenue worldwide over its life. That's the headline. The numbers I care about more, as an engineer:
Working at FlowGPT, I'm one engineer on a team building one slice of one product. LiveSnaps was the opposite — every decision was mine, every bug was mine, every customer email was mine. Three things stuck:
“The most useful thing I learned shipping LiveSnaps wasn't a technology — it was that "ship, sell, sunset" is a complete arc, and most software never finishes the third step.
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