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Comment by sant0sk1 | Hacker News Reader

$2.99? I really hope you raise the price. This app looks exquisite and it provides immediate value.

Well done! The iPad version could be a game changer...

A lot of people rate iPhone apps when deleting them, so I think a low price can really hurt your ratings. If an app is too cheap a lot of people, who aren't that interested will download it. After, however, they realize they never use it, they will delete it, and while they're at it, they might give it 2 or 3 stars. I think selling your iPhone app at a higher price could be beneficial, as mostly passionate people will buy your app, who will probably give it a 5 star.

I have not released an iPhone app (yet), but this is how I think of app prices; tell me if you have other experiences.

That might be the case at $.99. But if you go up a bit (even to $1.99 or $2.99), the amount of bad reviews like that decreases pretty quickly.

Do you know this from experience? I'm really curious how iPhone app customers "work".

Some patterns emerge from just taking a cross-section of the reviews to see how app customers behave at certain price levels. Here's my biased, inexperienced first blush at it:

1) Free users will destroy you in ratings, unless you are a universally known brand that is basically repackaging a pint-sized version of their popular website/application. I've seen people at the "Free" level say "I LOVE THIS APP BUT IT HAS THIS ONE SMALL PROBLEM SO I HATE IT AND GIVE IT ONE STAR YOU CAN'T PAY ME TO USE IT LULZY!" Freeloaders love free, but they will incessantly take advantage of it and are generally ungrateful, which shows in their ratings.

2) At .99 cents, you get casual and one-off users who know the value of their hard-earned dollar and will expect a relatively unreasonable amount of value because of loss-leader devs that price their complex apps that way to move up the charts. The 99-centers will conflate purchasing an item with an expectation of constant content refreshes or perfection in updates, or they will penalize. It's a false economy to try to appease these customers. Better to just cross fingers and hope to make it up in volume (or in-app purchases).

3) At 1.99-2.99, things start to get interesting. Your reviewers begin to appreciate the decisions you've made in the apps design or execution, give you actual usable (albeit terse and/or a bit angry) feedback, and ratings are a little higher overall.

4) At 3.99+, you are either a AAA game dev porting your blockbusters down to the iphone/ipod touch, or you're an indie that has built a following by selling volume pricing at first and then raising it up once you've cemented your position on the charts. Your reviewers are spectacularly verbose in their heaping of praise on you, and offer almost QA-level bug reports that you can use for your updates.

I think the sweet spot for someone starting in the app store is $1.99-2.99 US, plus a "lite" version with in-app purchaseable upgrade to the full version. Perceived value with a teaser freebie. If your app is at all useful/fun, then it'll gain an audience. I think alot of people just saw the "goldmine" app store articles and thought they could make an app that was just like iFart or iShoot "but cooler" and failed miserably.

I mostly agree with this. I have two versions of my card game in the store, one free, and one paid. I don't think it's possible to have a free app that has a rating greater than about 3 stars, unless you are a huge company with millions of downloads.

But based on what I've seen and read, I think my paid card game is atypical, price-wise. I've seen very little difference in the number of sales, whether the price is $0.99 or $3.99.

Do you know this from experience?

Yup. I'll go over what its like for the app that I work on, but, what muhfuhkuh said is very accurate as well.

I work on an app thats in the app store for $1.99. We see some bad reviews (people requesting features we already have, complaining about something thats out of our control (lack of backgrounding's a big one), etc). But, for the most part, the reviews are pretty good; our 4 and 5 star reviews combined amount to around double the 1, 2 and 3 star reviews.

In contrast to some of our competitors applications; one is $1.99 now, but was anywhere from $.99 to $3.99. It was on sale for a bit at $.99 and has some pretty bad reviews - lots of impulse buys and people not knowing how to use the application. It has more 1 and 2 star reviews then 3, 4 and 5 stars combined.

Another of our competitors applications is $4.99. It doesn't have nearly as many reviews, but the ones it does are "higher" quality. Maybe two or three reviews < 3 stars. But, only 20-25 reviews in total.

It is noted that the price is introductory.

I hope you raise the price as well, the reason being that this is a niche application. For the people it provides utility to, 4.99 or 7.99 even might well be worth it and for people that it does not provide utility to, it's not worth buying even at .99 and probably not even worth the trouble of downloading for free.

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