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Subscrible: a mobile game catalog app with few or no ads at $85K a month
Subscrible sells a mobile game catalog app with minimal or no ads to gamers and game developers, and it was making $85K a month according to founder-reported revenue in a May 2024 Starter Story interview.
How it started
Subscrible was started in January 2023 by Evgeny Unegovsky together with Igor Diev, described in the interview as a former UA manager at Playrix. The team is based in Limassol, Cyprus.
The idea came out of ordinary friction rather than a market study. Unegovsky says his child's limited playtime kept getting cut short by video ads, and that friends deleted games outright as soon as they saw cover ads. Paying for an ad-removal subscription in every game was not a workable answer either. Behind that sits the founder's reading of the economics: he says gaming companies spend nearly $27 billion on user acquisition while only about 10% of that investment comes back to game studios as revenue, mostly through non-intrusive formats.
Before any app existed, the team put up a landing page describing the idea with a subscription box and ran Facebook Ads against it. The founder reports a click-through rate of over 5% and more than 50 people subscribed ahead of launch, which he read as confirmation that demand was there. Building came after. The interview says the first version turned on a single technical question — whether ads could be disabled at all for users arriving from their app after recent Google and Apple updates — and that industry experts doubted it could be done. Two simple apps were built to prove the function worked.
Unegovsky's earlier career is in hosting, MarTech and travel tech. After graduating from ITMO University he founded a company providing website hosting, VDS, dedicated servers and distributed clusters; he moved to Israel in 2006, coded for the Israeli army, and over fifteen years co-founded two travel tech companies in Israel, one of them with more than $13 million per year in turnover.
What it sells and how it charges
The official site describes the product in these words: "Our innovative platform offers a vast catalog of mobile games with minimal or no advertisements, ensuring an uninterrupted and enjoyable gaming experience." The site's own description says it provides "gamers and gamedevelopers with a service that reduces amount of ads," and the homepage advertises unlimited free access and games without disruptive ads.
Two sides, two different propositions:
- For gamers: a free catalog app that aggregates games across types. The founder names Archero, Asphalt and Fantastic Jewel Lost Kingdom as examples in the catalog.
- For developers: a distribution surface for reaching players, with lower user acquisition costs and higher engagement, and fewer intrusive ads sitting between the player and the game.
On price, the app is free for gamers, and developers split user acquisition costs. No pricing page was published when the site was checked, so no rate card can be quoted here. The founder's stated revenue mechanism matches the same shape: money comes from spreading the cost of acquiring one user across multiple titles rather than charging the player.
How it got its first customers and what kept growth going
The pre-launch landing page produced the first audience — those 50-plus subscribers — and the app grew from there.
For customers on the developer side, the channel named first is conferences. As the founder puts it: "We've participated at gaming conferences like the Israel Mobile Summit, the Nordic Game Conference, the WN Conference in Belgrade." The interview adds that the team set up a booth at the WN Conference in Abu Dhabi, and describes events as the place where the platform's benefits get explained to developers in person.
Two other channels run alongside it: LinkedIn for reaching developers directly, and webinars on monetization and retention without intrusive ads, which the founder says regularly attract over 50 participants. He also mentions bonuses developers can claim through partners and an early community of developers and players. The founder states the game catalog had amassed over 15,000 users by the time of the interview.
What comes next, in his account, is an SDK to disable ads across more catalog games, an ad network built on non-interrupting formats, AI-driven game recommendations, and a crowdfunding platform for game marketing. Those are stated plans, not results.
The numbers
| Figure | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly revenue | $85K a month | Founder-reported, May 2024 interview |
| Founders | 1 | At the time of the interview |
| Employees | 7 | At the time of the interview |
| Catalog users | over 15,000 | Founder-reported, May 2024 interview |
| Started | January 2023 | Founder's account |
| Based in | Limassol, Cyprus | Interview |
Every revenue figure on this page is what the founder said on that date. It is not current revenue and it is not independently verified. The founder did not state a starting cost, so none is given here. 1M.chat classifies the business model as ads, sponsorships and affiliate.
How it compares
The comparison comes from 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. It is a self-selected sample — founders who chose to be interviewed — not a random sample of all businesses.
In the Mobile apps & games category:
| Measure | Category value |
|---|---|
| Businesses with founder-reported revenue | 37 |
| Median monthly revenue | $17K |
| Share at $1M a year or more | 19% |
| Median employees | 1 |
| Share started by one founder | 60% |
Top growth channels in the category, drawn from the 26 businesses with channel information: organic social media 58%, paid ads 42%, SEO and organic search 31%, communities 31%.
Subscrible's reported $85K a month is about 5 times the category median on 1M.chat's analysis. Putting the two side by side raises two observations, which are readings of these numbers rather than findings from a study. Subscrible's named channels — conferences, LinkedIn, webinars — sit largely outside the top channels recorded for the category, which are dominated by organic social, paid ads, search and communities; that fits a business whose paying side is studios rather than consumers. And with 7 employees against a category median of 1, this is a relatively staffed-up operation for its peers, consistent with a model that has to sell to developers as well as serve players.
What a founder can take from it
Test demand before you build. A landing page and a small Facebook Ads budget produced over 5% CTR and 50-plus signups before the product existed. That is a cheap way to find out whether anyone wants the thing.
Price the side that already has the budget. Gamers get the catalog free; the cost is carried by developers who are already spending on user acquisition. If one side of your market cannot pay, check whether the other side is already paying badly for the same outcome.
Go where your buyer already is. Conferences, LinkedIn and webinars move slower than a viral post, but they put you in front of the people who sign contracts. A booth at one conference is a repeatable action, not a lucky break.
Build from a problem you watched happen. This product came from a child's interrupted playtime and friends deleting games, not from a market map. Personal familiarity with an annoyance is not evidence of demand on its own — the landing page was — but it is a good source of specifics.
Read the benchmark before the headline. In this category the median founder-reported revenue is $17K a month and 19% of businesses reach $1M a year or more. One reported $85K month is a single self-reported data point from May 2024, not a typical outcome and not a forecast.
Sources
Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure