[6ren]

Those examples of elastic pricing are for consumer purchases (e.g. games).

The app in question is free for home use; but paid for corporate. Corporate customers have an unbelievably different concept of "expensive" from you and me.

I experimented with different prices for a corporate product, and found charging too little or too much reduced profits. (Sadly, this experiment seriously irritated at least one developer. Who knows, maybe a cheaper price would have lead to greater volume in the long-term.) I would love to price by customer (price discrimination), so corporates pay what suits them, and individual developers/small businesses pay what's reasonable for them. The standard approach is to have extra features in the "Enterprise" version, but I haven't found a way to make this work for me. Anyway... I'd rather everyone enjoy all features; not have version-config complexity; and get feedback/bug reports from everyone.

{rant: "Enterprise customers are an unbelievable pain. They take weeks to answer the simplest questions, they misunderstand, miscommunicate, make unfathomable mistakes, they have to go through Legal, Licensing, Management. And they tend to be discourteous, seemingly without realizing it. Their money - and they will spend more than you could realistically imagine - isn't worth it."}

[jgarmon]

I don't in general disagree, except to say that the consumerization of IT departments means that enterprises are using consumer-oriented stuff, so you get the best of both headaches these days.

And if you think the neterprise is bad, just try selling into the government channel. Jeebus frak, those guys are hideously cheap and supremely demanding. If it weren't for scandalously longterm lock-in due to high switching costs -- when everything is reviewed forever, almost nothing ever changes, including product selections -- no one would sell to the public sector EVER.