App Store Expense Monitor

We first posted about the App Store Expense Monitor app back in August.  Back then it was just a nifty little app that showed you your total expenditure on iPhone apps in the menu bar of your Mac, which was a nice little thing to do.

The app has recently been updated – to Version 1.2.1 – and has a fair bit more to offer and is looking very good.

In this latest version, showing your total spent on apps in the menu bar can be toggled on or off via the app’s preferences settings.

Now you also can launch the app and get a full, sizeable window to look at your app purchases in detail.  All the info is pulled directly from the iTunes folder on your Mac.

The information presented in its four columns is: Application names, the Developer, the Category, and the Price.

The extra cool thing about this is that you can sort the information by columns as well – so you can click once and instantly see how much you’ve bought by category:

App Store Expense Monitor

Or take a quick look at how many apps you’ve bought in each price bracket:

App Store Expense Monitor for Mac

And of course you can also choose to sort by Developer and see whose apps you’ve been spending the most on, or just whose apps you have the most of.

You can also export your data in .csv or .xml format, and really get your Analyst hat on.

It’s fun – and a bit scary – to troll through and see how much you’ve spent on apps, and to check out things like how many Books apps you’ve got as opposed to how many Entertainment apps, or how many Games versus how many Utilities, and so on.

I like the App Store Expense Monitor app quite a bit.  I hope they’ll bring out a Windows version soon.  In the meantime, if you’re a Mac user, you can grab it here:

http://wetfish.de/software/app-store-expense-monitor/

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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

1 cellgfx December 31, 2009 at 1:39 am

Is there any way for the app to pick up the actual amount paid for the app at the time it was bought? The last time I ran it, it said I had paid the full price for many apps that I'd got either free or discounted. This skewed my spend total so much, I thought I was going to get my credit card confiscated!

2 patrickj December 31, 2009 at 5:53 pm

Not that I know of – sorry.

3 Hal December 31, 2009 at 2:30 am

This should be there right in iTunes as columns (just tweeted the fact a few hours ago), showing what I paid when I bought it and the current price.
"Price of zero and crap app?" -> delete. At the moment I would have to look through my purchase history in emails
to get that info.

4 patrickj December 31, 2009 at 5:53 pm

Good point – I'd vote for that. :)

5 William Mize December 31, 2009 at 6:31 am

Awwww man. 10.5 or better. Boo! Hiss!

6 patrickj December 31, 2009 at 5:54 pm

Why are you holding off on updating, just out of curiosity?

7 Christopher Allen December 31, 2009 at 5:12 pm

What I really want is something that scrapes the iTunes store for descriptions of the things you've bought at lets you search them. I know there is an I app I bought for "xyz" but what in the heck is the name of it?

8 patrickj December 31, 2009 at 5:55 pm

App Store search includes the description field already doesn't it?

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