People need to realize that the sales business model does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.
I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game.
Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, data passes through my servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month, which I can't justify without compensation.
I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.
People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to tell them to f-off.
People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.
But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even cover the costs of the sales channels.
That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be turning that back.
You would know your market way better than me, but just anecdotally I'm usually willing to pay $5 for a useful app. Based on your numbers it sounds like that would still make you money after 10 or so years. If the app is source available, I'll go up much higher. I'm definitely not a typical user, but for a "power" tool I'd think I'm in your market.
I know you exist. I'm actually able to find literally dozens of people like you, every month.
OTOH, for everyone of you (users willing to pay $1 for a tool that'll solve a problem they have every once in a while), I'm able to find 1000 that'll just install the ad supported app, use it that one time and forget about it (until the next time they need it).
Trust me: the barrier to get even $1 from a user for an app the majority uses once a week tops for a couple of minutes, is immense, especially if they can run it for free, in exchange for the annoyance of a single banner ad, that you can dismiss (and go full screen) after 30s, if you do use it longer than that.
But the free version must exist, for discoverablity if nothing else, and experience shows that degrading it to drive sales only jeopardizes total revenue. So ads it is.
But if I were a user of your app, I would personally prefer to pay you $5/yr for whatever "fancy upgrades" it would require for that to get you enough subscribers to be workable.
But this is a personal preference! It's definitely the case that most people prefer to use free (apologies, I don't know if this applies to your app, but it usually does) crap.
But I do think a niche of people like me totally exists, and is actually not that small.
I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game.
Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, data passes through my servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month, which I can't justify without compensation.
I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.
People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to tell them to f-off.
People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.
But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even cover the costs of the sales channels.
That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be turning that back.