

Do we need paid upgrades in the Mac App Store? - ryannielsen
http://www.mentalfaculty.com/mentalfaculty/Blog/Entries/2012/3/28_Paid_Upgrades_and_the_Mac_App_Store.html

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saurik
I run an alternative to the App Store (Cydia) that happens to support paid
upgrades. As far as I can tell, they are an important mechanism that allows
developers to obtain a hardcore audience and then support them into the long-
haul.

This article seems to believe that you can continue to expand your market
forever, as there "are always more fish in the sea", but in fact some (many)
products really do have limited appeal: you need to not lose the people you
have.

And honestly, that's actually what "free upgrades" means: it is the developer
telling the people who already like his products that they are no longer
considered his customer; that he is no longer attempting to make the product
better for them.

Instead, he has chosen to target the incremental increase in users that he can
obtain by using the existing users only as a marketing channel, and then
gearing the product towards continuing to sell new people who don't have your
product yet.

While this might work for some products, you /are/ going to get diminishing
returns: the sales graphs for products like this are always exactly the same,
with a long and reasonably flat but definitely and certainly declining tail.

