Payday AI: Methodology
Last updated: 8 September 2026 Contact: support@thepayday.ai
Payday AI is a directory of solo businesses and tiny teams that are really making money, with every figure checked against a real source and dated. This page explains, in plain terms, how we work out what a business earns, how we decide what counts as a trend, and what we do when we cannot verify something. Nothing on this page is financial or business advice.
How we work out what a business earns
There is no single formula. The right method depends on how the business actually gets paid, so we sort every business into one of a few groups first, and each group has its own way of arriving at a figure.
- Sold through the App Store or Google Play. A data company called Sensor Tower reads what the app stores themselves publish and estimates downloads and spending from it. That figure covers purchases made through the store's own payment system only. It never includes advertising money, and it never includes anything the business also sells through its own website.
- The website add-on. When we can confirm a business also sells the same product through a checkout on its own website (not just a marketing page with App Store badges on it), we add a fixed 10.3% on top of the store figure. That number comes from Duolingo's 2025 filing with the US regulator, the one public company that has disclosed how much of its revenue moves through its own website checkout versus through Apple and Google. It is a general correction borrowed from one public company's disclosure, not something we measured about the specific business on the page, and we say so next to the figure. It also does not close the gap between a store reading and a much larger number a founder might claim publicly. For an app business, the store reading plus this add-on where it applies is the whole figure. We state it once, as one number, not a range.
- Running its own live, public revenue page. A handful of businesses publish their own real-time revenue figures. When that exists, we just read it and say so. There is nothing for us to estimate.
- Software sold through its own website, billed monthly or yearly. This is the largest group, and the one with the least certainty, because almost nobody in this group publishes a revenue number anywhere. We estimate it from years of the business's own search traffic, plus published, independent figures for how many people who start paying for software like this are typically still paying a year or two later. Because this method carries real uncertainty, we publish it as a range (a low figure and a high figure), never a single invented number in between, and never a lone upper limit dressed up as if it were the whole answer. If the numbers behind a business do not support a real range, we say plainly that there is no estimate, rather than publish a bad one.
- Everything else. Etsy shops, paid newsletters, physical goods, print on demand, job boards and several other shapes of business each get their own plain rule, worked out from whatever that platform actually publishes. Many of them publish nothing usable at all, in which case the page says plainly that we do not estimate the revenue, rather than guess.
The rule behind all of it: if nothing public exists to build a real number from, we say so and estimate nothing. A confident-looking number built on nothing is worse than an honest gap.
What a figure can and cannot see
Every figure on Payday AI is one of two kinds, and the page always says which:
- Something the business or a public source stated. A founder's own claim, or a reading off a third-party service like Sensor Tower. It carries the date it was true for and, wherever possible, a link to check it yourself.
- Our own estimate. A number we computed, labelled as ours, dated to when we ran the arithmetic, with the working shown.
Some businesses carry a "Stripe-verified" label. That name describes the profiled business's own payment processor, confirming its revenue directly from its own Stripe account. It is not a claim about Payday AI's own billing, even though Payday AI also happens to bill its members through Stripe.
How trends work
A trend is a real lane of demand, tracked with real search-volume data bought from a search-data provider, not a guess or a model's opinion. Most trends are built from the solo businesses already in our directory that share a real pattern; a smaller number are built purely from search demand we have found before a business shows up to prove it.
Every trend is measured across a family of real search terms, usually ten to twenty of them and never fewer than five, and at least one of those terms has to have genuinely reached 500 real searches in a single month at some point over the last five years. A term that spiked once and faded still counts. A trend with no terms clearing that bar does not get a page; it gets more research instead.
Search-data providers occasionally misreport the very latest month for a search term, in a way we can identify because the wrong number repeats itself exactly on a re-check. When that happens, we hold the previous month's real figure instead of publishing one we do not believe, and we mark it on the chart. Every other point on every chart, including real spikes and real drops, is shown exactly as measured.
Tell us if something is wrong
Every business page carries a free, no-account link for pointing out a mistake. Real evidence changes the record: we correct a wrong figure with a dated note, we never quietly delete a number and pretend it was never there, and we never take a page down just because someone would prefer it gone. See our FAQ for what happens after you use it.
What this page is not
Payday AI is information, not financial or business advice, and never a promise of income. We make no income promises, ever. Treat every figure, sourced or estimated, as a claim to check for yourself, not a fact to bank on.