Skip to content

How the money works (plain version)

The detailed spreadsheet and figures are in ../business/financial-model.md and ../business/financial-model.xlsx.

The simple idea

The app is free for job seekers. We make money in ways that never involve selling your data.

The three ways we earn

  1. Optional extras (~$19–29/month). Backup, syncing across your devices, and a "just works" AI option for people who don't want technical setup. Totally optional — the free version is genuinely useful on its own.
  2. Coaches, bootcamps, and schools (~$10–12 per person/month). These groups pay to use WorkWingman with the people they help. This is the steadiest money because they don't cancel when one person gets a job.
  3. Later, with permission: proving your work/school history is real, and eventually partnerships with big job platforms.

What things cost us

  • Running an AI for you: nothing if you bring your own key; a few dollars a month if we run it for you.
  • Backup/storage: pennies per person.
  • Keeping the app working when job sites change their forms: this is real ongoing work (a few hours a month per job site).
  • Verifying work/school history (later): about $5–$15 per check through a vendor.

What it takes to break even

Rough planning numbers:

  • If we only served individual job seekers, we'd need around 80,000–120,000 active users to support a small team. That's a lot — and hard, because people leave when they get hired.
  • But if we sell to coaches and schools, it gets much easier: about 50 organizations could bring in roughly the same money as 100,000 individual users — and they stick around. That's why the "sell to helpers" plan matters so much.

Real examples from similar apps

  • Teal (about 4 million users) charges $13–79 and recently bought a smaller competitor.
  • Simplify (over 1 million users) proved the free-core idea works.
  • Huntr sells to bootcamps and universities — exactly the plan we're copying.
  • Monster and CareerBuilder — the old-school job boards — went bankrupt in 2025. The old way is dying; the trusted-helper way is what's next.

The bottom line

WorkWingman can be a very big business and keep job seekers first — as long as we earn trust, sell to the helpers, and never become a spam machine or a data seller.

The plan over time: roadmap.md · How we grow: how-we-grow.md