GHAN vs. Setapp and curated app bundles

A curated bundle rents you a shelf in someone else’s store and pays a share of a subscription you do not control. A cross-promotion network sells installs at a fixed price and leaves the customer relationship entirely with you.

By Daniel Matalon, founder of GHAN · Published 2026-09-22 · Updated 2026-09-22

Two different products

	Curated bundle	GHAN
What it is	A subscription catalogue people browse	A network where member apps show each other's cards
Who holds the customer	The bundle	You
Who bills	The bundle	You
What you receive	A share of subscription revenue, recurring	An install, once, at a fixed price
What you give	Catalogue inclusion and usually pricing constraints	A placement slot inside your own app
Discovery surface	The bundle's own store	The moment after someone installs another app
Cost to you	Revenue share	A fixed CPI, or credits you earned by serving
Curation	Editorial, by the bundle's team	Automated gate plus reputation and behaviour scores

When a curated bundle is the right answer

Your app is a secondary purchase — genuinely useful, but nobody wakes up intending to buy it.
You are comfortable not owning the billing relationship.
Your support load per user is low, because bundle users cost the same to support as full-price ones and pay you less.
You want distribution in a catalogue people actively browse, which is a surface that essentially does not otherwise exist on desktop.

When cross-promotion is the right answer

You want the customer, with your licence key, your email address on file and your upgrade path.
Your app is a primary purchase and a bundle would cannibalise full-price sales.
You already have an audience and would rather spend attention than money.
You want a fixed, published price rather than a negotiated share.

The overlap is smaller than it looks

Most of the tension between these models disappears once you notice that a bundle is a place people go and a cross-promotion network is a moment inside software people already use. The bundle competes with the Mac App Store and with your own website. GHAN competes with Google Ads and with your affiliate programme.

Plenty of apps run both, and the decision about each is independent.

What GHAN will not claim

GHAN will not tell you a bundle is a bad deal. For a whole class of app — utilities that are delightful to discover and impossible to search for — a curated catalogue is the single best distribution that exists on desktop, and a revenue share is a reasonable price for it.

What GHAN offers is the other half: a way to reach people at the moment they are installing software, at a price that is published rather than negotiated, without handing anybody the customer relationship. See the rate card.

Questions people ask about this

Is Setapp worth it for a desktop app?

It depends almost entirely on whether your app is a primary purchase or a secondary one. If people seek your app out by name and buy it directly, a bundle converts full-price customers into a share of someone else's subscription. If your app is something people are delighted to find but would never have gone looking for, a bundle is distribution you could not otherwise buy. The question is not the revenue share; it is whether the bundle is cannibalising demand you already had.

Can I be in a curated bundle and on GHAN at the same time?

Yes. They do not overlap operationally or contractually in any way that matters. A bundle is a distribution channel with its own catalogue; GHAN is a network in which your own users see other apps and their users see yours. Being in both is common and sensible.

Who owns the customer in each model?

In a curated bundle, the bundle does - it holds the billing relationship, the support relationship in many cases, and the churn data, and you see an aggregate payout. On GHAN the person installs your application from your own download URL and becomes your customer with your licence, your billing and your email list. GHAN never sees your users.

Which pays more per user?

Neither answer is general. A bundle pays a recurring share for as long as the person keeps using your app inside it, which for a long-lived utility can exceed a one-time licence. GHAN costs you a fixed CPI once and then the customer is yours forever at zero further cost. The bundle is an annuity you do not control; the network is a purchase you do.