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Besides ChatGPT, relatively few AI consumer apps have become breakout hits. But one app maker’s experience suggests there are plenty of lucrative consumer niches to be served.

Seoul-based Wrtn Technologies says it’s generating more than $8 million in revenue a month from operating AI storytelling apps for hardcore anime and game fans in South Korea and Japan. Wrtn (pronounced “written”) is about to expand to the U.S. with a similar app called OOC, or “out of character,” a common term in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Wrtn says its two existing AI storytelling apps, Crack in South Korea and Kyarapu in Japan, have less than 500,000 monthly active users combined. That implies its revenue per user is about $17 a month. That’s in line with what video streaming services cost and it suggests these apps’ users regard them as a regular source of entertainment.

That makes sense: Wrtn’s apps enable users to create anime-like characters and stories by interacting with an AI chatbot. The plot develops in real-time based on prompts they suggest to the chatbot, and vice versa. Users pay for tokens that allow them to write text prompts so they can keep exploring stories in all kinds of settings, from romance to adventures. The AI chatbot generates both text and images. (The apps don’t sell ads, but the company isn’t ruling out ads in the future.)

Wrtn says it uses Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini models to power the apps.

Djay Lee, a co-founder and chief product officer at Wrtn, said the company’s AI apps have high revenue per user because the target audience is “otaku,” a Japanese term for obsessive fans of certain anime and games. Even though such consumers are a small subculture, they tend to allocate a lot of their time and money to these hobbies. Some users of Crack and Kyarapu spend more than $1,000 a month on those apps, according to Lee.

While businesses need to justify the cost of AI for workers, hardcore anime fans are driven by a different kind of motivation.

“It’s not logic,” he said. “We are not selling efficiency. We are selling emotions, fun and excitement.”

Lee said he was inspired by the global success of Genshin Impact, one of the world’s highest-grossing mobile games developed by China’s miHoYo. The game, which is immensely popular among anime fans around the world, has generated billions of dollars in annual revenue, proving how lucrative this subculture can be.

Founded in 2021, Wrtn Technologies worked on an app that helped users improve their writing before shifting to AI storytelling. It launched Crack in 2024 and Kyarapu in 2025.

Now the startup wants to export its playbook to the U.S. with the launch of OOC. Like South Korea and Japan, the U.S. has an established market for otaku that overlaps with the Dungeons & Dragons players. Americans who subscribe to Crunchyroll, a streaming service owned by Sony that specializes in anime and Asian content, are among the potential target customers for OOC, Lee said.

Competition will be fierce. In the U.S., AI roleplay chat apps including Character.AI and Talkie allow people to interact with AI characters. Some of these roleplay chat apps are popular among teenagers, who don’t necessarily have a lot of money to spend. (Most users of Wrtn’s apps in South Korea and Japan are in their 20s, 30s or older, Lee said.)

Wrtn aims to double its annualized sales to $200 million by the end of this year, with the U.S. accounting for about 15% of its revenue.

The company said its gross profit margin at the end of last year was more than 30%. Apart from the cost of AI models, the startup’s expenses also include some payouts to Apple, which take a cut of the apps’ revenue from in-app purchases. Its gross margin figure is lower than that of Anthropic and OpenAI as well as smaller startups such as AI music app Suno and enterprise AI firm Cohere, though it’s higher than the gross margins of some coding assistant apps.

Wrtn aims to turn a net profit by the first half of 2028, Lee said.