Building macOS apps and Earning my First Indie Money (sort of)

Recently I bought a new MacBook Air M1. It's just the base model, but it's enough for my long-term goal of building for Apple platforms.

A few days ago, I built A tool to remove the background from Images.
It was a Free tool with the option to give me something if the user wanted to. Users provided their own API key from Replicate ( https://replicate.com ) and used it on their own.
I shared it on Reddit. Only then did I come to understand that macOS has that ability built in.
Nevertheless, few people downloaded it and a kind soul even gave me 1$

After learning the fact that that feature was built-in in macOS, I pivoted to my new Idea.
This one was an App to used OpenAI's whisper API from macOS. There exist apps for locally running, but there was no simple way to use the hosted API versions that like OpenAI's.
I shared this also on Reddit and to my surprise, out of the blue, somebody bought it for 5$.
Then 5 USD may be very little as per where you're living, but in my part of the world, it's pretty something.
The story didn't end there. The next morning I woke up to another sale.

Only later did I come to know that some people weren't able to open my app because my app was not Notarized (Apple's verification process. It cost $99). So I got money from my super kind friend bought an Apple developer account and notarized the app.

I'm super grateful to everyone who bought it from me.

Just rant I know. But as someone who has been reading all these and not posting anything, I thought I'd share something here.

Note: I added sort of because, earlier this year, I participated in something called half-day build and sold a product named AI SQL Assistant.
but this time's different