you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 11 points 7 months ago (5 children)

The only time this breaks down for me though is that I still struggle to pay $0.99 for a mobile app I use often sometimes. Really not sure what it is.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    It's wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody's willing to pay a dollar for it. It's a very depressing situation for an independent developer.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah. I used to have a $20 shareware product back when kagi was a payment processor. Apple introduced $1 pricing as a dick waving contest and fucked the entire indy developer community.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn't seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a "freebate" -- basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.

    I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I've never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn't seem very likely.

  • source
  • parent
  • On iOS I have no problem paying 20 euros once or 10 per year for an app I like. Sometimes more if it's really useful and/or the desktop app is included. Monthly is a harder sell though.

    I payed 7 euros for Collections Database and goddamn I wish it had cost more or the developer would add a tip jar.

  • source
  • parent