Five separate apps are earning off the same free public data feed, at the same time, right now

This room is mostly people worrying that somebody will take their idea, so here is a counterweight I found while counting apps.

One free government weather radar feed. Anyone can call it, no key, no licence, no exclusivity. On top of it sit at least five separate consumer apps, all with real store presence and estimated monthly revenue running from roughly two million at the top down to eighty thousand at the bottom.

They are not competing to own the data. They cannot. The data is a public tap and each of them is selling a different bucket: one is a slick paid radar, one is an alerts product, one is basically a map with a subscription, one launched two years ago and is doing fine underneath all of them.

The revenue figures are modelled estimates, so treat them as an order of magnitude. The thing that is not an estimate is that five apps in the same store, on the same feed, all found enough people to keep going.

Which reframes the copying question. If five products can share one identical input indefinitely, the input was never the moat, and neither is the feature somebody screenshotted from your changelog. What separates those five is who they built for, what they left out, and which one shows up in the search result.

The idea being visible is not the risk. Nobody is copying you into your niche.