

$0.99 iPhone apps are underpriced - eoge
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/iphone-apps-are-underpriced/

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jreposa
It took effort to create our _free_ app. We originally believed that having a
highly branded app would outweigh the costs of development. One issue we're
facing is negative reviews. Out of the thousands of downloads, we've had 25
one star reviews. The people who enjoy our app just aren't prompted to give us
a review. We're down to two options.

    
    
      1. nag/prompt the satisfied users for a review inside app
      2. price it $4.99

~~~
gkoberger
What are the negative comments? Could it be that your app needs improvement?
Maybe it doesn't offer enough value to justify the "heavy branding"?

Without seeing your product, consider option 3- try to improve your software.

EDIT: Downloaded, and I really like it. I've downloaded a ton of apps that
were clearly made because "we need an iPhone app with our logo on it", so I
had no clue what to expect. Sorry for the uninformed critique :)

~~~
jreposa
Oh... and nobody leaves an actual comment. 1-star reviews without any
information on why it's 1-star. our lowest rating with a comment is 3-stars.

~~~
mortenjorck
This is a real deficiency in any rating system. A one-star review (or a five-
star review, either end of the bell curve) should require a short review as to
precisely why the user thought the app was so terrible (or so outstanding).

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Groxx
Well duh, they're underpriced. Given the time to develop, even at minimum
wage, the vast majority probably never even get close to matching their costs.
Unless you include a bajillion which were made to solve problem X for user &
programmer Z, and they'd like _something_ when they may have released it for
free. And the app store makes that a _brainlessly simple_ choice.

$1 is well below the impulse-buy threshold, and $1 might as well be free for
most people. But the difference on the developer's side is that they get
_something_ , instead of _nothing_. $1 compared to a $0 app means a single
sale is an _infinite_ (fine, undefined) increase in income, which totally
eclipses the chart's 11% net income increase from a %1 increase in price.

From another angle: what if your favorite free software cost $1 instead? Would
you still use it? How about you donate that $1 to the developer directly?
You'd be in the extreme minority of any who donated, I guarantee it, and if
they had charged $1 they'd probably get several times the income from that
freeware in a _year_ than from _all_ their donations.

To make matters worse for app-store developers, people are arguably _even less
likely_ to donate when downloading from the app store, because it's not built-
in.

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rauljara
I agree with the conclusion, but there's a little bit of disconnect between
the that and the evidence the author's citing. The economics statistics are
all regarding a 1% increase in price. The astute may notice that the
difference in price between a $0.99 app and a $1.99 app is slightly greater
than 1%.

The point behind the studies he cited was that an otherwise unnoticeable
increase in price helped the bottom line. Those studies have nothing at all to
do with app store pricing, which doesn't give you the option of even having a
1% increase in price.

The top grossing category section of the argument was much more convincing.

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michael_dorfman
_Well free apps are never going to make any money. That’s obvious, right? You
wouldn’t think so with some people._

Wrong! Free apps can definitely make money-- just not through software sales.
Free apps need to be monetized some other way, and in many cases, this is a
much smarter way to go.

~~~
jlgosse
A friend of mine released an Android app for free on the Android Market (we're
in Canada), and he has made virtually nothing on advertising.

The model available to him was limited to clicks and not impressions, so while
he has had tens of thousands of impressions and a decently large number of
active users, he receives a very tiny number of clicks and therefore makes a
profit that is less than negligible.

One of the apps I released on the other hand (on another store), has cost a
variety of prices between 1.99 and 2.99, and I've made a few hundred dollars
in sales.

Think about it this way: he makes around $5 CDN a week in advertising for his
free application which took him weeks to develop, whereas my app nets me
around $1.90 USD per sale and it took me about one full day's work.

I've kind of rambled on at this point, but basically what I'm saying is this:
I need to sell less than three copies a week to top his profit, and I'm
running on a store that has significantly less traffic than the Android Market
and selling my app, not giving it away.

~~~
pchristensen
Virtual good sales have made good money from free and $.99 apps. I'm drawing a
blank on the game, but even people who pirated one iPhone game still bought
virtual goods in-game.

