Earnback

Earnback is a local-first dashboard for indie game and app studios that buy ads. It answers four questions:

1. What did my players cost, per channel, campaign, video and country?
2. Do they open the game, play and come back?
3. How much have they earned back through ads and purchases, and how fast?
4. Is the test I’m running on track: budget, pass marks, next review?

How it works

1. Sync. earnback reads your ad spend (Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, CSV files), your players (Firebase / Google Analytics 4) and your revenue (AdMob, in-app purchases) with your own API access, and keeps them in a SQLite file in your project folder.
2. Report. It writes one self-contained HTML file and opens it: an Overview with your running tests, Campaigns (down to each video), Players (funnel, retention), Revenue (payback per channel) and, with several games, a Portfolio page.
3. Digest (optional). Once a day, a short message goes to Telegram, Slack, Discord or ntfy: yesterday’s spend and players, how each test is doing, and alerts when a budget limit is crossed, a campaign stops delivering or tracking breaks.

Principles

• Local-first. No account, no server, no telemetry. Data stays in .earnback/ inside your project folder; API keys stay in your user config folder.
• Read-only. Earnback never changes a campaign, a budget or a setting on any platform.
• Honest numbers. Every figure knows which filters it can honour. When a number can’t be computed honestly, Earnback shows “–” and the reason instead of a guess. Platform-claimed conversions are never compared across channels. Cost per player is a range, not a false precise value. See Metrics.
• Bring your own API apps. You create your own Google Cloud project, Meta app and TikTok app. Earnback ships no shared keys.
• No runtime dependencies. Node’s own fetch, node:sqlite and node:crypto. The report is one HTML file with no network access.

Privacy

• Earnback talks only to the APIs of the sources you enable, with your own credentials, and only reads.
• The report is a local file. Its content security policy forbids network requests, so it can’t send anything anywhere. Secrets never enter it.
• Digests are the one thing that leaves your machine: a few aggregated lines (spend, player counts, rates, campaign and plan names) go to the service you connect and sit on that service’s servers. No per-player data exists in Earnback to send.
• No telemetry, no update checks.

Limits worth knowing

• Currencies are not converted. Keep your ad accounts and analytics in one currency; Earnback flags a source that reports in another.
• Players depend on your analytics. Players who decline analytics consent are missing, so cost per player for one channel is an upper bound. GA4 needs about two days to settle; the report and the digest say through which day each source is complete.
• Install attribution without an MMP comes from GA4’s first-user source. Google Ads links natively; Meta and TikTok players are recognised by their store referrer and are undercounted. See each source guide.
• TikTok is implemented against the documented Business API but not yet tested against a live account.

Next

• Getting started: install, your first project, configuration, tests with budgets, several projects, commands.
• Sources: one setup guide per platform.
• Daily digest: Telegram, Slack, Discord, ntfy.
• Metrics: what every number means and what it can’t show.
• Architecture: for contributors.