

Ask HN: Your best advice on how to price and market a dev tool? - goingitalone

I'm writing a small dev tool for Android developers. I'm into the home stretch now and will be releasing it in a month or two I hope.
Please forgive me not saying what exactly it does yet.<p>Difficult decisions remain; how to price it, how to market it.<p>It's a small tool but the selling point is it should shorten a time consuming task I found myself having to do almost every day and should be a common experience for many Android devs. It's not trivial to re-impliment there is nothing that does this that I am aware of and I hope to compete on quality should someone copy the idea but the main point is it is supposed to save developers a couple of hours a week.<p>I'd love to open source it but I have no idea how to live off an open source licence in this case.<p>A starting point would be say $49 and hope people won't copy it too much and stay honest. I've got to sell quite a few copies a year to live off that though. Some have suggested to me that I should price higher and hope enough companies buy several copies and loss lead with individual devs copying it.<p>It will not do everything in it's domain perfectly from the 1.0 release but I intend to continually improve the tool by adding new features and paying attention to bugs and offering regular updates (e.g. weekly).<p>So what are your experiences and/or advice?<p>thanks.
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ig1
I don't want to burst your bubble, but you probably won't make enough off it
to live. Let say there are 5,000 android developers in the world (you can
probably get the exact number off Google somewhere), out of those maybe 10-20%
are doing it professionally.

Lets say you can convince 10% of those developers to buy your app, that's
50-100 sales. At your price point that's between $2,500 - $5,000 in revenue.

(these are back of the envelope calculations, so I may be mistaken here, but
it seems unlikely there's a huge market).

You might be better off selling it as a service rather than as a product,
because at least that way you'll turn it into a recurring revenue stream
rather than a one-off one and won't have to deal with piracy.

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goingitalone
Are there so few Android devs out there?

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ig1
Even if you assume 50,000 Android developers the numbers don't come out great.
My number might be wrong but it's probably not wrong by two orders of
magnitude.

Update: <https://www.mylookout.com/appgenome> reports that number of
developers on android between Aug 10-Feb 11 grew by 4,000. So the number of
android devs is probably in the low to mid tens of thousands.

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revorad
There's a YC startup working on this problem of helping startups decide their
pricing - <https://freshplum.com>. You should email them to ask for help.

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goingitalone
thanks.

