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Comment by benofsky | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought iPhone apps have become too cheap and are grossly underpriced. iPad apps will take longer and require more skill to make, they should be more expensive. and at an average price of ~$5, that's not much at all.

I wish iPad app prices would stay at this level but they will almost certainly become diluted down to the iPhone levels (remember a year ago iPhone apps were ~$5).

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For some reason, many people tend to greatly undervalue their time and effort.

I have a couple of apps in the AppStore. All of the apps that I've made were initially solely intended for my use, but I usually end up throwing them on the AppStore, mostly for the fun of it.

One of them is a extremely simple app I literally put together in about four hours; when I put it on the AppStore I priced it at 99 cents just to see what would happen. Surprisingly (for such a simple app), I was getting a steady 5-10 sales a day. A couple of weeks later, I jacked the price up to $3.99 just to see what would happen. For the first week at $3.99, I actually had between 15-20 sales a day. Since then, my sales have never dropped below 8 sales per day.

By increasing my price, I actually had a net increase in both quantity sold and revenue.

As with most products, higher priced goods are perceived as having more value than their lower-priced counterparts - even in the AppStore.

Wow, that's really interesting. I can definitely see how that would work though, most of the 99c stuff on the app store is utter crap, I tend to just mentally skip over it. :-)

The lowest I price my apps (beside rare cases) is $1.99 exactly for that reason. For more people .99 = crap (and often it is true)

Have you seen the article about the game that was initially launched at 99c and then progressively increased to $350? It's really the best example I've seen about how bad the pricing in the AppStore has really become.

I'm not sure that this is the original source, but its Google's first result: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27628/GDC_Refenes__Saltsm...

I saw that too but I think that the reason that guy got kicked off the app store was for getting a lot of chargebacks. I think the people buying the app were confused as to the actual price because it's hardly the case that a game would cost $350 maybe $3.50. When most of the purchasers were all confused it hardly seems fair to extrapolate a unified theory about how bad the app store pricing is. But that is just my interpretation of the article.

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