| 100% agreement. From my experience: Low priced apps imply loads of users to make money. The people whose price sensitivity falls close to your low price are more likely to be cheapskates or find your software marginally useful. They are far more likely to complain and require support. God forbid you are selling at a one-time-fee (which is why I think the current mobile development land-grab will flame out and transform into services-on-your-phone). You are going to be expected to provide support forever, at the drop of a hat, for any version of your application. Figure out a way to get recurring. If you go cheap/free, you monetize with ads (often ineffective and always annoying to your users) or by spying on your users. I doubt many of us want to do the latter (Although, sadly, enough of us might to knock out the ones who don't. Race to the bottom!) I now want to pay good money for the apps I use: I want the developer(s) to eat and drive nice cars. I want them around and in the game for bugs, integration changes and general support. I want them to not feel any pressure to jam new features in just to get another rev out the door for the upgrade money. Effectively, I want to pay them a lot of money for their software, because it is often incredibly valuable to me, I just want to do it on a payment plan where I can opt out if I no longer find the software useful. I think that model, in most cases, leads to better software than either the open source model, the one-time-fee model and the freemium model. |