{"id":91,"date":"2008-11-16T15:12:22","date_gmt":"2008-11-16T21:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2008-12-19T12:22:57","modified_gmt":"2008-12-19T18:22:57","slug":"pricing-iphone-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/2008\/11\/16\/pricing-iphone-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"Pricing iPhone Apps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over on Safe From the Losing Fight, Andy Finnell posted about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.losingfight.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/15\/how-to-price-your-iphone-app-out-of-existence\/\">wrong way to price iPhone apps<\/a>, and I have to say that I agree.<\/p>\n<p>If you look at the pricing for other phone apps on other mobile platforms, prices are much higher, enabling developers to at least stand a fighting chance to make a living.   In particular, the apps on mobile phones usually are $4.95 or higher.   On the Palm, a reasonably good Sodoku game runs around $9.99 or even higher.   The same apps on the iPhone are either free or $0.99.   How in the heck can a developer make a living doing that?<\/p>\n<p>The real killer of pricing at $0.99 (or even $4.95) is that the support you can provide at that price is virtually nothing.  Really the only thing you can do is write a web page with an FAQ.   Answering that support e-mail actually costs you money if it ends up just being a &#8220;user error&#8221;, rather than a real bug.<\/p>\n<p>Now, don&#8217;t get me wrong&#8230; You need to make sure your apps are as bug free as possible and getting reports from users is important, but at $0.99 answering questions for confused users that don&#8217;t understand how to use your application can kill a product, because you can spend all your time doing support, and not developing know apps.<\/p>\n<p>Apple (and Sega) set expectations for what applications should be priced by making Monkey Ball $9.99.   On any other mobile platform, a game like that would run between $19.99 and $24.99.   I think developers are in the mindset, &#8220;Well, this thing isn&#8217;t as good as Monkey Ball&#8230;.I have to price it lower&#8221;.   But a year from now, how many of those people are still going to be around?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over on Safe From the Losing Fight, Andy Finnell posted about the wrong way to price iPhone apps, and I have to say that I agree. If you look at the pricing for other phone apps on other mobile platforms, prices are much higher, enabling developers to at least stand a fighting chance to make [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17,34],"tags":[329,328,70],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-iphone","category-startup-companies","tag-apple","tag-iphone","tag-iphone-application-pricing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuresteve.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}