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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting observation for me in this post was the realization that no-one would pay 25 bucks for my app while it's a normal prize for a T-shirt. Yet, arguable, the skills required for me to make a T-shirt are much less than the ones required to make a new app.

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I sell t-shirts on the side. As a person who makes/sells t-shirts and uses apps (and only occasionally pays for them), here's how I think about it:

It's not about the skills required to make a t-shirt or app. Consumers don't care about that. All they care about is whether or not they're going to be using it. I'm usually hesitant to pay for apps because I don't know if I'm going to use them more than a couple of times. (Exception: I paid like $100 for Things 2 and 3, after using them during the free trial and realizing I loved them and was going to keep using them. And I have.)

It's easy to look at a t-shirt and think "Oh golly, I'm going to wear this all the time!"

Another really common reason people buy t-shirts is as gifts. I wonder if there's any corollary to that in the app world. Can people buy apps as gifts for friends? People will definitely spend ~$10 to send a friend a download link to gag app that mocks them, I bet.

There may also be the physicality of it.

A t-shirt is something you get, and can keep as long as you don't ruin it.

BTW, i recall reading that someone had more success with a "unlock feature X" model of payment, even though it in total was more expensive than unlocking everything at once.

For a great example of that look to the Android app Pleco, a Chinese dictionary. Free to download and use, but have to pay to unlock features. Between 5 and 30 dollars per feature, I've sent at least 70.

At least on non-mobile, people buy games for each other (e.g. by buying a gift code on Steam).

Yes, I often buy people apps on iOS for slightly-special occasions when we aren't going to see each other in person.

App prices are all about uncertainty. 90% of apps are total crap. 90% of the non-crap apps are not what you in particular are really hoping for. This makes the risk-adjusted cost of finding a good 99c app into $99.

If your customers were actually confident that your app really was worth $25 to them, they'd pay it. Unfortunately, it will probably cost you >$25 in marketing to get that across to them.

Users' price expectations call for different success models.

I suppose that if you sell a t-shirt via something like cafepress, you make something like $2 per shirt. If you sell a $3 app via app store, you make the same $2.

OTOH developing a nice elaborate picture for a t-shirt might be 20 hours, while developing a bare-bones first version of a useful app is 200 hours, and for a more polished app, easily 2000 hours over several versions.

So, a successful niche app should sell 10x to 100x copies than a successful niche t-shirt to bring in the same money.

The process of designing, making, selling and distributing t-shirts is highly productized. With apps and web services, it's manual custom labor. Almost like making (t-)shirts before the industrial age.

However, as the recently featured Indie Hackers story about Scott's Cheap Flight shows, there are already a lot of possibilities to build businesses on top of productized processes and softwarem instead of doing custom work.

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/scotts-cheap-flights

I think part of it is also availability. We know, as consumers, the average price of certain goods, and in an effort to save money, avoid spending when it seems obscene, without looking at the bigger picture. If the average price of mobile apps was 40$, and your equivalent app was sold by 20$, it would sell like hotcakes.

In comparison I can buy t-shirts for 5$ so I would never pay 25 for one.

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