[jarpadat]

I'm an iOS developer and I have 3-4 location-based products. Maybe I'm just not in your target market, but this component doesn't solve any problem I have. Seeing a bunch of dots that change places every time I zoom in is visually jarring and not very helpful. Only in rare circumstances would I prefer this visualization over seeing all the pins.

Now if you did a heatmap-type visualization, or had something that crossed over more smoothly between "wide angle" and "close up" zooms, I would be interested--that's actually a problem I would pay something for. But I would be more interested in seeing the component large-format: iPad or Mac or Web. Dashboard-type visualizations to monitor global infrastructure or something. Because people aren't going to do a ten-inch pinch on a phone, they just want to see the ten coffee shops on this street, and notation groups aren't needed for that. But I might want to visualize the whole world's tweets on a ginormous zoomable kiosk or do it in a presentation or a dashboard of my customers or something.

Quite frankly I'm happy to pay for a UI component but I want the vendor to have put in the time and effort to think about the UI so that I don't have to. All the iOS APIs have a lot of thought put into the UI (pages and pages of rationale in the documentation), and for a premium component that's your entry bar. Grouped annotations sounds like the way I would initially try to solve this problem, would prototype it and realize that it didn't work, and then try heatmaps. Maybe heatmaps won't be an effective metaphor either. The value a good premium component has on iOS is NOT that it's a cheaper component, but it takes out a lot of design risk, a lot of bad prototypes. The point is, I'm willing to pay great money for a great UI, and no money for a mediocre one.

The problem with your pricing is that the binary people will need more support from you than the source code people (who can fix the problem themselves, and optionally send you a patch). You need to price a few hours of support into the low-end product especially, so $150 is too cheap. I might just drop that product, as the source product is priced about right and is also a lower support burden.