I guess someone has to say it: Developers are usually no great business men. Instead of using the great possibilities the internet and the various app stores are offering us, we are in the process of completely devaluating our own work, our software.
But let's start at the beginning: As you might know, beside the
main products I'm working on, I'm also doing
some experiments here and there, trying out how to make money today by writing smaller pieces of different software. That way, I also have a handful of apps on various app stores.
Last week, I received a "one star" rating for one of the nicer apps I have on there, along with a text like:
It's outragous that this app costs 9 euro!
And this for a quite complicated app, nearly without bugs, which solves a specific problem and needed in total about 4 man months of development time. And is updated regularily.
With apps in the app stores set to a price between 1 and 3 euros, people simply got used to these low prices. This way people begun to think that software is only worth about one euro. The problem: If you as developer don't have an app which sells a couple of thousands of times every month, you won't be able to live from this.
So here is a simple idea: Stop setting such a small amount of money as price for your software. You are destroying the market with this. Instead, demand a healthy, acceptable price, and restore the value of software development with this as nice side effect. I'm doing this already: My software is priced usually between 20 and 50 euro. And people buy it. And there are interesting side effects:
- Before buying, people really read the description of your software, and actually think before hitting the 'buy' button. You get less negative reviews, less complaints, and it seems in average more 'intelligent' users.
- Less people will buy your app, meaning you also get much less support requests.
And if your competition offers a similar product for that 1-3 euro price? You might not believe it, but people don't seem to care that much. My experiments show that I'm earning nearly the same from a product set to a price of 40 euro then when it was set to 9 euro before. And I don't have headaches anymore because of the huge amount of support requests I got when it was set to that cheap price.