zalizedata/paid-validated-app-niche-index

Paid-Validated App Niche Index — Apps Proving Willingness-to-Pay

An index of 2,101 paid-validated apps — apps whose rankings and review volume prove users pay in their niche — with validation scores, category summaries and in-app-purchase activity signals, computed from real app-store collection data.

Part of the DataForge Open Data program — full production packages, free for academic and personal use. Canonical dataset page: https://data.zalize.com/datasets/paid-validated-app-niche-index

Packages in this repo

Package	Tier	Rows	Size	SHA-256
paid-app-opportunities-tier1-S-2026-08-02.zip	S	278	0.1 MB	f5359c83230fd6f0fe2861ecf76b89bb6386c088c7bed6ad891078e4de121bba
paid-app-opportunities-tier1-M-2026-08-02.zip	M	2,101	0.4 MB	66a6357217cb45d86720caefd7210d216f6156d54d7336223299602f0ec50187
paid-app-opportunities-tier1-L-2026-08-02.zip	L	2,243	0.4 MB	921df7759b829447a9e5e0cb6464d1bd617d9a556ebfebf0a52722b8030deb75

All files are also served from the machine-readable open-data index: https://dl.zalize.com/open-data (per-package URL: https://dl.zalize.com/open-data/<package_id>).

What you get

• S — Top 250 paid-validated apps by validation score
• M — Full index: every paid-validated app + category summaries (2,101 rows)
• L — Full index + in-app-purchase activity signals (2,243 rows)
• Data dictionary, datasheet and license in every package

Use cases

• Indie developer / studio niche selection
• App portfolio investment screening
• Pricing strategy research

Source & methodology

DataForge derived aggregate metrics (paid validated app niche index)

Coverage, update cadence and the full field-level data dictionary are on the dataset page: https://data.zalize.com/datasets/paid-validated-app-niche-index (DATA-DICTIONARY.md and DATASHEET.md are inside each package zip).

License

CC BY-NC 4.0 (DataForge curated layer; academic/personal use, attribution + backlink required) — commercial use requires a DataForge commercial license

• Academic / personal use: CC BY-NC 4.0 on the DataForge curated layer — attribution and a backlink to https://data.zalize.com are required.
• Commercial use: requires a DataForge commercial license — contact us via the portal.
• Upstream license terms continue to apply to the underlying data.

Citation

DataForge (data.zalize.com) — https://data.zalize.com/datasets/paid-validated-app-niche-index

DOI (Zenodo mirror): 10.5281/zenodo.21813364 · GitHub Release mirror: https://github.com/wookat/dataforge-pipelines/releases/tag/open-data-paid-app-niche-index

Archive bundles (zip)

Original packaged bundles (docs + data + checksums) are kept under archive/; the same packages are mirrored at dl.zalize.com/open-data.

• paid-app-opportunities-tier1-L-2026-08-02.zip
• paid-app-opportunities-tier1-M-2026-08-02.zip
• paid-app-opportunities-tier1-S-2026-08-02.zip

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("zalizedata/paid-validated-app-niche-index", "category_summary", split="train")
print(ds[0])

Available configs: category_summary, iap_active, paid_apps.

Related datasets

More DataForge open datasets in Apps & E-commerce:

• app-store-apps-charts-reviews-sample
• App Review Complaint Benchmarks — Category Baselines + App Complaint Profiles
• High-Demand Low-Rating App Category Opportunity Scan
• shopify-products-catalog-sample

Full catalog (25 datasets): https://data.zalize.com/open-data · all HF repos: https://huggingface.co/zalizedata