# Two constitutional law professors' case-law app: a reader base built over 5 years, moved onto the phone to sell subscriptions · Mobile app > Source: https://stringers.io/en/apps/ios_6780707461.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08) > Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date. > For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt > Two constitutional law professors have run #LaCorteDice since 2020. They already had website subscriptions, books, and academic conferences, and longtime readers converted straight to app subscriptions. Ecuador's news Top Grossing chart is almost all foreign publications, so a few subscriptions a day can reach the top ten. [Mobile App](https://stringers.io/en/apps/index.md) · iOS · written 11-6 L La Corte Dice · Veronica Hernandez # Two constitutional law professors' case-law app: a reader base built over 5 years, moved onto the phone to sell subscriptions **What it is** A paid mobile library of Ecuador Constitutional Court case law: rulings organized by topic, each with a decision number and paragraph number, for $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr. **Why it took off** Two constitutional law professors have run #LaCorteDice since 2020, with a website, books and academic conferences already in place. Longtime readers simply converted into app subscribers. Ecuador's news Top Grossing chart is almost all foreign publications, so a few subscriptions a day is enough to hit the top ten. **C** **How you could follow it** If you personally are, or can find, a named authority in a specialist field, copy the structure: keep content in the original CMS, use Expo + RevenueCat as the subscription shell, offer a 7-day trial, and switch to other Latin American countries' court case law or other jurisdictions. Grade C: it worked because the authors spent 5 years building reputation and readers, which a follower can't get. The app itself has no barrier: the official version is free, and one country, one jurisdiction for a year brings in a few thousand to ten thousand dollars. The path is worth learning from, but copying it isn't worth the effort. Few people know about it yet Data (updated daily) · First seen 2026-07-17 · EC rating 1 · charted in 11-08 of 1 stores iOS · best category chart rank · by store Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Lower rank is higher; gaps mean it wasn't charted that day iOS · ratings count · EC Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Apple doesn't publish download counts; rating growth is a proxy for downloads. La Corte Dice is a paid Ecuadorian app that sells summaries of Constitutional Court rulings for $4.99 a month. It ranked #9 on the Ecuador App Store news Top Grossing chart, next to The New York Times, The Economist and Bloomberg. But it has only 1 ratings worldwide. This isn't a story of an app suddenly blowing up: a legal content brand that had been around for 5 years paid a contractor to move its longtime readers onto mobile. The path is worth learning from, but the most valuable part is hard to copy. ### A chart from Nov 6 In Nov 6, the top ten News Top Grossing apps on the Ecuador App Store were: X, The New York Times, PressReader, CNBC, Ground News, Substack, The Economist, Bloomberg, **La Corte Dice** , and EL PAÍS. Nine are brands known around the world, and the remaining one is a local app whose content is constitutional case law. It's not a one-off spike. Oct 28 #8, Oct 31 #6, Nov 5 #16, Nov 6 #9. For ten days it sat between #6 and #16 on the Ecuador News Top Grossing chart in the App Store (10-28 to 11-06). The Top Free chart moved even more, showing up anywhere from #20 to #187. But its rating has stayed at 1 ratings, all five stars, with no new ratings in those ten days. It launched in Jul 17 (2026 year), a release went out in Jul 18 1.0, and there have been no updates since (App Store page, 11-06). ### What it sells Open the app and the content is sorted by topic: acción de protección, hábeas corpus, hábeas data, special protection actions, and the various constitutional principles. Each entry is a distilled "criterio" (ruling summary), followed by a **ruling number and paragraph number** you can paste straight into a legal brief. It also has search, bookmarks, and a reading layout designed for long legal text. The store page says the audience is "students, judges, teachers, scholars, journalists, legal professionals, and ordinary citizens." The contractor who built the app is more specific on their case study page: **"Reading on a phone, in the gaps between court sessions."** Pricing: free to download, 7-day trial, then $4.99/month or $49.99/year. Available on iOS and Android. ### Why the chart ranking is so high Two reasons. The first one matters most. **First, the bar on this chart is low.** The top 200 grossing apps in the Ecuador News category are almost all Western publications and podcast tools, and each probably has only a handful of subscribers in Ecuador. A local professional tool pulling in a few subscriptions and renewals a day could crack the top ten (inference, based on the chart's makeup). Filing itself under News instead of Reference or Education makes it stand out more on the chart. Whether that was a deliberate choice, I can't tell. **Second, the audience and the content were already there.** #LaCorteDice started 2020 years ago. Its two founders, Verónica Hernández and Álvaro Contreras, both teach constitutional law at universities, and Contreras has served as an advisor to the Constitutional Court (lacortedice.com). They began by explaining in plain language what the Constitutional Court had ruled on social media. 2021 year(s) ago they built lacortedice.com, which has a case law library, subscriptions, and e-books such as *500 criterios jurisprudenciales*, *La Constitución comentada*, and *Acción de protección paso a paso*. The app was the third step. The freelance developer Alex Santos Navas writes on his case study page that the app was built with Expo, subscriptions run through RevenueCat, and the backend is the WordPress setup from 2021 years ago: "The content team publishes in the same backend as always, and the app reads from it directly." In other words, the app carries no content cost of its own and didn't have to find an audience from scratch. ### Where users come from - **The site's existing readers** (confirmed): website subscriptions and the bookshop had been running for 2021 years, and those people made up the app's first users. - **The founders' and organization's social accounts** (confirmed): Hernández's X account @VeronicaLHM pinned the tweet announcing the app's launch. The organization's account @lacortediceEC has posted 858 times and claims to have shared 1,500+ case summaries. Their Instagram @lacortedice has about 3,000 followers. - **University classrooms and academic conferences** (confirmed): they have run an online "First Case Law Congress" (free registration) and an "International Congress on Constitutional and Tax Law" with 30 speakers from 10+ countries, plus a labor law congress. This is where students and young lawyers first came across the brand. - **Store search and chart placement** (inference): most people search for "La Corte Dice" by name, and the chart position adds some extra exposure. - **Ads** : I found no evidence of paid promotion. That doesn't rule it out, but at this scale it probably isn't needed. ### How much money The only public numbers come from the contractor's case study page: **more than 200 paying app subscribers, with more website subscribers** . It also says the app reached #16 in Ecuador's App Store News category. This is the contractor marketing themselves to win clients, and I haven't verified it. If 200 people mostly buy annual plans, the app brings in roughly $7,000 to $10,000 a year in revenue (estimate, before Apple's cut). It's small, but it's real money, and it adds almost no cost: the content is already being written, and the app just adds one more checkout. Lawyers will pay because briefs really do need constitutional precedent. Ecuador's protection actions, special protection actions, and habeas corpus filings are all common, and the "ruling number plus paragraph number" format solves the problem of citing accurately. At $49.99 a year, it costs less than half of the lowest tier of Fiel Web, the long-established local legal database (Fiel Web runs about $90 to $1,298 a year, per edicioneslegales.com.ec). Students can afford it. ### Who it's competing with | Competitors | What it is | Compared with alternatives | |---|---|---| | Official Constitutional Court app (CorteEc) | iOS / Android, free. The official X account promoted the download in April and August 2026 years running. | Has full-text rulings and an official case guide, but you have to find the summaries yourself in the full text. **Being free is the biggest threat.** | | Fiel Web, LEXIS Ecuador, vLex | Long-established all-area legal databases. LEXIS has already added an AI assistant. | Covers all areas of law, priced for law firms. La Corte Dice covers only constitutional law and is an order of magnitude cheaper. | | LegalCloud.ec, Lexius, MindLaw, and others | AI legal Q&A that appeared in 2024–2026 | Uses AI to search full texts. La Corte Dice's content is curated by humans. | | La Corte Dice Tributaria | Launched in September 2026, free, indexes 5,414 tax rulings, with AI search | Built with a partner brand (another company, Census Consultores), not a copycat | | General models like ChatGPT | Can summarize anything | Paragraph-level citations aren't reliable, so lawyers won't cite them directly | So it's neither the first nor the most feature-complete. It occupies a narrow gap: **curation by named, authoritative authors + low price + easy to read on a phone** . ### If it were you **Verdict: there's a practical lesson here, but copying it is a poor bet.** The app's real asset is the names and readers that two constitutional law professors built up over 5 years. The app itself is something anyone can build, and the official version is free. What you lack are the authors and readers. Even if you assemble them, one small country and one legal domain is worth a few thousand to ten thousand dollars a year. **Who it's for:** you are already a named, recognized content author in a specialized field (law, tax, medical guidelines, accounting standards) with a website, books, courses, or a community, and you just need a mobile checkout. Or you're a developer who can find such an author and is willing to work on a revenue-share basis. **Who it's not for:** pure developers who want to build their own content from public rulings. Without a named authority behind it, nobody pays, and mass-generating summaries with AI runs straight into the "inaccurate citations" problem that lawyers distrust most. It's also not for anyone hoping to build a big business here. The ceiling is one professional community in one country. **How to build it:** copy the structure. Keep publishing content in the existing WordPress or CMS, read it in the app through a cross-platform framework like Expo, handle subscriptions through RevenueCat, show a three-screen onboarding, offer a 7-day trial, and price the annual plan at about half of the lowest tier of the local established database. Directions that could be transplanted: constitutional court or supreme court precedents in Peru, Colombia, or Bolivia, or tax and labor law in the same country (the partner brand has already taken Ecuador's tax law). **How to acquire users:** through the author, not paid ads. Pinned posts on the author's social accounts, university classrooms, industry conferences, and e-book readers. When launching, pick a local category with few paid apps and few foreign publications. A handful of subscriptions can get you on the chart, and that exposure comes free. **Deadline:** there's no tight window. The real countdown is AI: official databases and established ones are adding AI, and general models keep getting better. Lock in the author brand and the subscription relationship before general models can reliably give paragraph-level accurate citations. **Signs I'm wrong:** ① Ecuador's Constitutional Court's official app adds topic-organized summaries and La Corte Dice drops out of the top 30 on the News chart. ② Fiel Web or LEXIS launches a personal plan with the price cut to around $50 a year. ③ The other way around: if La Corte Dice launches the same product in other Latin American countries within six months, or two or three copycats covering other countries' case law also reach the top of the charts, it means the model is more replicable than it looks, and I should revise my view upward. ### Sources - App Store page (Ecuador storefront) and iTunes lookup, 11-06; App Store Ecuador News Top Grossing and Top Free charts, 10-28 to 11-06. - Google Play listing (com.lacortedice.app). - Contractor's case study page: alexsantos.info/work/la-corte-dice (revenue and rankings are the contractor's own claims, not verified). - Official sites lacortedice.com and lacortedice.com/la-iniciativa; congress site lacortedicecongreso.com. - X: @lacortediceEC, @VeronicaLHM; the Constitutional Court's official X posts promoting the app, 2026-08-01. - La Corte Dice Tributaria: lacortedicetributaria.com; Fiel Web pricing: edicioneslegales.com.ec. [iOS store page ↗](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6780707461) **Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report** Competitors | Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one | |---|---|---|---|---| | Official Constitutional Court app (CorteEc) | iOS | About 2026-04 (official X promotions 2026-04-24 and 08-01) | Official, free | The official side publishes full-text rulings and the official guide, free. La Corte Dice sells expert-curated topic summaries and precise citations. | | Constitutional Court website case guide / search | Web | Years ago | Free | You have to find the summaries yourself in the full text | | Fiel Web(Ediciones Legales) | Web | Long-established | Leading Ecuadorian legal database, about $90–$1,298 | Covers all areas of law, priced for law firms. La Corte Dice covers only constitutional law and is an order of magnitude cheaper. | | LEXIS Ecuador (with AI agent LEX) | Web | Long-established | One of Ecuador's two major legal databases | All areas of law, has AI, expensive | | vLex Ecuador | Web | Long-established | International platform | All areas of law, expensive | | LegalCloud.ec / Lexius / MindLaw | Web | 2024–2026 | Small | AI Q&A that searches full texts, not human-curated summaries | | La Corte Dice Tributaria | iOS | 2026-09-11 | Free, indexes 5,414 tax rulings; iOS Reference Top Free chart #59–#188 | Partner brand with tax case law, free, with AI search | | General-purpose LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) | Big-company features | — | Very large | Paragraph-level citations are unreliable | Where users come from - **Verified** **Migrating existing users (website subscriptions / books / training)** : lacortedice.com has sold subscriptions and e-books since 2021; the app and website share the same WordPress backend (alexsantos.info) - **Verified** **Founders' personal and institutional social media (X / Instagram / Facebook / LinkedIn)** : @VeronicaLHM pinned the app launch tweet; @lacortediceEC has posted 858 times; IG @lacortedice has 2,991 followers - **Verified** **Academic conferences and university teaching** : I Congreso de Jurisprudencia, International Congress on Constitutional and Tax Law (lacortedicecongreso.com); both founders teach at universities - Inferred **Store brand-name search + News Top Grossing exposure** : in Ecuador's News Top Grossing it ranked #6–16, and the rest of the chart is mostly foreign publications (appstore library) - Inferred **Ads** : none found ## La Corte Dice (iOS id6780707461): why it made it onto the charts ### Bottom line It isn't an app built from scratch. It's a subscription shell that moves **an existing paying readership** onto mobile, from #LaCorteDice, an Ecuadorian constitutional case-law brand that has been running for 5 years (since 2020) across social media, books, website subscriptions, training, and academic conferences. Both founders are constitutional law professors and former advisers to the Constitutional Court, so the authority and the audience were already there. It hit #6–16 on the Ecuador News Top Grossing chart mainly because **the bar on that chart is very low** : it's dominated by foreign outlets like the NYT and The Economist, which sell only a handful of subscriptions in Ecuador, so a few subscriptions and renewals a day are enough to chart. It has only 1 ratings. As an app it didn't break out; as a business, it's a small but real niche subscription. ### Key facts - Developer account Veronica Hernandez (the founder herself). The account has only 1 apps, 2026-07-17 released, and no updates since v1.0 (iTunes lookup, 2026-11-06). - Price: free download, 7-day trial, then USD 4.99/month or 49.99/year. Available on iOS and Android (com.lacortedice.app) (App Store / Google Play listings). - Ratings: 1 globally (5 stars). No new ratings from 10-28 to 11-06 (data card / appstore library). - Chart positions (appstore library chart_rank, charted only in the EC store, genre 6009 News): - Top Grossing: 10-28 #8,10-31, #6,11-05, #16,11-06, #9. Over ten days it stayed between #6 and #16. - Top Free: bounced between #20 and #187 each day (11-05 #20,11-01, #187). - On the same day (11-06), the top 10 in Ecuador's News Top Grossing: X, NYT, PressReader, CNBC, Ground News, Substack, The Economist, Bloomberg, **La Corte Dice** , EL PAÍS. The top 200 are nearly all Western publications and podcast tools (appstore library v_chart). In other words, few local paid apps sit on Ecuador's News Top Grossing, so a professional subscription tool that brings in a few payments a day can reach the top 10. It was categorized under News rather than Reference/Education, which makes it very visible on the chart (whether that was deliberate is unknown). - Revenue claim: the outsourced developer Alex Santos Navas's case study says "200+ paying subscribers on the app, with more on the website subscriptions," and that it "reached #16 in Ecuador's App Store News chart" (https://alexsantos.info/work/la-corte-dice/; the same figure also appears on his /mvp-development/ page). This is the agency's own promotional material for winning clients, and it has **not been verified** . Rough math: if 200 people mostly bought annual plans, annual revenue would be around $7–10K. ### Competitors | Competitors | Where | Launched | Scale | How La Corte Dice differs | |---|---|---|---|---| | CorteEc / official Constitutional Court app (Corte Constitucional del Ecuador / CEDEC) | iOS / Android | The official X account promoted the download 2026-04-24 and posted again 2026-08-01 | Official endorsement, free | The official app offers full judgments, an official case-law guide, and service tools. La Corte Dice sells expert-curated **criterios (legal holdings) by topic** , plus case numbers and paragraph numbers for easy citation. The official app is free, which makes it the biggest threat. | | Constitutional Court website case guide / search | Web | Already around | Free | Same as above, but you have to extract the holdings yourself from the full text. | | Fiel Web(Ediciones Legales) | Web + app | Long-established | Ecuador's major legal database, annual subscription about $90–1,298 (edicioneslegales.com.ec) | Covers all areas of law, aimed at law firms, and expensive. La Corte Dice covers only constitutional holdings at $4.99/month, affordable for individuals and students. | | LEXIS Ecuador (with AI agent LEX) | Web + app | Long-established | One of Ecuador's two major legal databases | Same as above: all domains, firm-level pricing, already has AI added. | | vLex Ecuador | Web | Long-established | International platform | All domains, expensive, English-language product. | | LegalCloud.ec / Lexius / MindLaw and other AI legal assistants | Web | 2024–2026 | Small | Uses AI Q&A to search full texts. La Corte Dice is human-curated holdings, with no AI. | | La Corte Dice Tributaria(CENSUSCONSULTORES / Census Legal Tech) | iOS (2026-09-11) / Android / web | 2026-09 | Free, covers 5,414 tax rulings; ranks #59–188 in the iOS free chart's Reference category (appstore library). | A partner brand (led by John Arias, co-hosted conferences with #LaCorteDice) doing tax case law, **free** , with AI search and offline access. Not a copycat, and the developer is a different company. | | General-purpose LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) | Big-company features | — | Very large | Can summarize rulings, but paragraph-level citations are unreliable. Lawyers need accurate, directly citable sources. | Bottom line: Ecuadorian constitutional case law already has a free official app and two established paid libraries. La Corte Dice isn't the first and doesn't have the most features. It occupies the gap of "holdings curated by credible authors + low price + mobile reading." ### Where users come from (growth levers) 1. **Moving existing users over (confirmed)** : the website lacortedice.com has offered subscriptions and a bookstore since 2021. It sold e-books such as the 500 criterios jurisprudenciales, La Constitución comentada, and Acción de protección paso a paso, and it also offers training. The case study says it in its own words: "same WordPress backend, the content team keeps publishing as usual, and the app reads from it directly." So the app needs no new content, and the website readers are the first users. 2. **Founders' own social media and credentials (confirmed)** : Verónica Hernández (@VeronicaLHM, 4,178 posts) pinned the app launch tweet. The institutional account @lacortediceEC has posted 858 times, claiming it has "shared 1,500+ case-law summaries." Instagram @lacortedice has 2,991 followers (Brave search snippet). There are also Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Both founders teach constitutional law at universities, and Álvaro Contreras served as a Constitutional Court adviser (lacortedice.com/la-iniciativa). Students and young lawyers are an audience already in place. 3. **Academic events, in person and online (confirmed)** : they ran the "I Congreso de Jurisprudencia" (on Zoom, free registration), the "Primer Congreso Internacional de Derecho Constitucional y Tributario" (30 speakers from 10+ countries), a labor law congress, and more (lacortedicecongreso.com, congresolacortedicelaboral.com). These events are an acquisition channel. 4. **Store brand-name search (inferred)** : users are searching for the name "La Corte Dice." The News Top Grossing placement gives it some store exposure. 5. **Ads (none found)** : no evidence of ad spend was found. The ad libraries only track products on our list, so not finding ads doesn't mean there were none. 6. Media / big accounts: none found. x-radar searched "LaCorteDice" over the past 120 days and got 0 results. ### Why people would pay - Constitutional lawsuits in Ecuador (acción de protección, acción extraordinaria de protección, hábeas corpus) are common, and lawyers drafting filings need to cite Constitutional Court precedents. "Case number + paragraph number" directly solves the problem of citing accurately. - Price: $49.99/year, roughly half the cost of Fiel Web's lowest tier, and available to individuals. The barrier is low for students and young lawyers. - Trust: the author is a professor in this field, and the books and courses have already built a reputation. ### Differentiation - Product differences: human-curated topical holdings, each with a citation; covers only the Constitutional Court; designed for long-form reading; cheap. - Is this really why it worked? **Partly.** The real reason is the brand and audience built over 5 years (an asset). The app just moved existing subscriptions to mobile and borrowed the app store's payment rails. The features themselves (categories, search, bookmarks) are easy for anyone to build, and the official app is free. - Risks: the free official app, and Fiel and Lexis are both adding AI, and general-purpose LLMs keep getting better. How long "human-curated holdings" can command a premium is unclear. ### Visibility / copycats - Visibility: **not many people know about it yet.** The only public revenue number is the agency portfolio's line "200+ subscribers." There's no TrustMRR data and no coverage from media or big X accounts. - Copycats: none. La Corte Dice Tributaria is a parallel product from the partner brand (free, built by a different company), so it isn't a copycat. The recall card says "the team used the same backend to clone a reskinned matrix," but no evidence was found: Tributaria was built by Census Consultores and has its own AI web app. ### What others can borrow - The path of "an established content IP / community of professionals + an outsourced subscription shell app": the content team keeps publishing on WordPress, the app reads the same content using Expo + RevenueCat, there's a three-screen onboarding, then a 7-day trial. Costs are low and revenue comes quickly. - The bar for News / Reference Top Grossing in small countries is very low. A local-language professional subscription tool, placed in a category crowded with foreign publications, can reach the top 10 with a few subscriptions, which earns store exposure. - Transferable to other Latin American countries: constitutional court / supreme court holdings (Peru, Colombia, Bolivia), tax law, labor law. The prerequisite is finding local credible authors. ### Uncertain - Whether the 200+ subscribers are real, the split between annual and monthly plans, and how many website subscriptions there are: none of this has been verified. - Android installs: the Play listing wasn't captured, and the googleplay library doesn't cover it. - The download scale of the official CorteEc app, and how much it affects willingness to pay. - Whether there's any paid acquisition: no evidence found, but ad library coverage is limited. ### Sources - App Store page / iTunes lookup: [apps.apple.com/ec/app/la-corte-dice/id6780707461](https://apps.apple.com/ec/app/la-corte-dice/id6780707461) - Google Play:[play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lacortedice.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lacortedice.app) - Agency case study page: [alexsantos.info/work/la-corte-dice/](https://alexsantos.info/work/la-corte-dice/) - Official sites: [lacortedice.com/](https://lacortedice.com/), [lacortedice.com/la-iniciativa/](https://lacortedice.com/la-iniciativa/) - X: [x.com/lacortediceEC](https://x.com/lacortediceEC), [x.com/VeronicaLHM](https://x.com/VeronicaLHM); Constitutional Court official app post [x.com/CorteConstEcu/status/2083651485913526488](https://x.com/CorteConstEcu/status/2083651485913526488) (2026-08-01) - Congress: [lacortedicecongreso.com/](https://lacortedicecongreso.com/) - Tributaria: [lacortedicetributaria.com/](https://lacortedicetributaria.com/); Instagram post [www.instagram.com/p/DeutsnmmkN7/](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeutsnmmkN7/) (2026-10-20) - Fiel Web pricing: [edicioneslegales.com.ec/producto/fielweb-vip/](https://edicioneslegales.com.ec/producto/fielweb-vip/) - Internal DB: appstore tables chart_rank / app_profile / v_chart (2026-10-28 to 11-06) This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.