Apple is the wealthiest company on the planet. Millions of people around the globe use Mac laptops and desktops. So having your app ranked as one of the top 10 best-selling paid apps on the Apple Mac Store should net you a nice sum of cash, right?

Apparently not. Developer Sam Soffes has revealed that he only needed 94 downloads for his app Redacted to reach number eight on the list of top overall paid apps in the Mac App Store on it's first day, which netted him a grand profit of just $302.

Redacted is an app that allows you to easily obscure sensitive information from your images, as you can see in the demo below. Users can send an image of their passport or driver's license over the web and block out details like document numbers or date of birth, or exclude text from scanned documents.

This useful functionality sent Redacted straight in at number eight in the top overall paid apps in the Mac store shortly after it was released on May 6. It made Soffes the envy of his friends, who assumed he had earned a fortune, he explained in a blog post. "Until then, I hadn't really thought about how much that would be. All of this success was exciting," he said.

The excitement didn't last long when he woke the next morning to see the actual figures. Soffes priced Redacted at $4.99, based on advice he'd received on Twitter. So, when he saw the pitiful earnings he'd made, he decided to ask Twitter to guess what he had earned.

Twitter responded with 37 guesses. "I threw out the lowest and highest guesses, which were both hilarious" wrote Soffes. "The average guess was $12,460.67."

So much for the wisdom of the masses. In reality there were just 94 downloads, seven of which were bought with promotional codes, resulting in total sales of $452. After Apple took it's customary 30 percent, Soffes was left with just $302. That's not exactly enough to hang a career on and Soffes said in his post that he will soon start working for Venmo.

The publicity that Soffes' post has garnered has, of course, done his sales no harm and Redacted is currently sitting at number 2 in the top paid apps list. This is, of course, just the Mac App Store. Mac computers come with so many preinstalled apps that the majority of users probably never need to download any new apps. The money involved for top iOS apps is likely to be a lot more significant.

Photo: Umberto Brayj | Flickr

Redacted 1.0 Demo from Sam Soffes on Vimeo.