[onion2k]

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20.

The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it. If you decide a price based on the level of effort it takes you then you are almost certainly not charging enough.

I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

The danger that someone could release a free version of your app exists regardless of what you've made. That's not a very good reason not to make an app and try to sell it.

[jawns]

> What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it.

Go one level deeper. How much effort would a competitor have to put into building a competing product and undercutting you?

If the answer is "one afternoon," then you either need to figure out a way to make competition less likely or set a more realistic price.

[onion2k]

Maximising revenue while the isn't a competing product is a good idea though. Why would you reduce your price before there's any competition? That would just be giving money away.

Also, people often trust a product they pay for more than something that's free. A plugin that's free could be doing all manner of nefarious things under the hood. A paid product comes with a level of implicit trust (wrongly, in my opinion, but still).

[Crinus]

One interesting piece of advice i heard some time ago is that you shouldn't worry about what your competitors are doing or might do since you have no control over them nor over how your customers perceive them, so any time spent dealing with competition is time wasted not working on your own product.

(note that this was in the context of smaller developers / indies / MicroISVs / etc, it might make sense to do the above if you are a big company with a dedicated marketing department)

[jakear]

If it really takes the competition a whole afternoon to implement this, $20 is an incredible price. Even just an hour for any in-house SWE in America is going to cost the company at least $20.

[jawns]

Replace "competition" with "user" and you have a point.

But what I mean is that if it takes only an afternoon to replicate 95% of what this tool offers, then a competitor could knock it out and start charging $10, or $5, or $1, or heaven forbid, release it as a free tool.

If that happens, the only people who are going to pay $20 are those who have no idea that the other tools exist.

There are certainly companies who operate solely on marketing power and get people to pay for things they could otherwise get for free -- see ProPublica's TurboTax investigation -- but for a tool like this, I can't see how it could work out in the long term.

[peterangular]

> The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it.

Yes it should. If I know someone w/my same talents can come along and knock the same functionality out in a few hours it's going to make me push the price-barrier down so someone does't just come along and eat my lunch.

As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this.

Anecdotal I know - but the word "undercut" is popular in pricing conversations for a reason... aaand I've been undercut by another engineer copying my product for a cheaper price before.

[onion2k]

As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this.

If you believe your time is worth $250/hour then you're going to leave a lot of money on the table when a customer comes along who values the solution you can implement at $500/hour.

[peterangular]

Consulting isn't product dev and pricing!