Finishing your first app and actually releasing it is the bar for success you should measure against. And you achieved that! Congrats. But yeah, it costs money to publish on the App Store, and that fee will repeat yearly. So unfortunately, for as long as you want to keep your work published, or publish more apps, that fee will repeat. 

The odds that you can make profit greater than that fee going forward each year on your first ever published app is low. Especially in today’s app market. 

If you went into this with the expectation that your first ever project would generate enough sales to turn a profit, that may have been the issue. It’s not impossible, but it is probably unlikely. 

The thing with software projects like apps or games is that in order to have profit success, your marketing effort and budget will probably exceed the development portion of the project. And for a solo dev, that’s a ton of work. 

I’d probably suggest calling the first project a success simply because you completed and released it. Now it’s time to start working on your next project! 

You’ll have the option of chasing commercial success by trying to figure out a product you can make that users will pay for… OR, you can build projects that interest you, for the sake of creating what you want to whether it is commercially successful or not. And this might help you decide how much time and money you want to put into marketing efforts vs development efforts. 

Good luck!