Why should I pay for an app?

Money is extremely hard to come by in the software world.

A couple of anecdotes.

One, I created a game for iOS and Mac (and it’s not some cheap-looking trinket; it’s extremely elaborate). After 4 months on both stores, the grand total units sold are less than even the threshold for payments (i.e. I haven’t even been paid by Apple yet!) and the Mac version sold more! There are also no reviews, or at least they are below the threshold. I strongly believe the low sales are because I had the audacity to charge a couple bucks up front instead of giving away everything for free. And the lack of reviews are a chicken-and-egg problem that may also affect purchasing (still interesting that people might resist spending even $3 over a lack of reviews?).

On a separate project (that is free software and has been for decades), I decided to try adding a donation link. It’s been up for over a month with a grand total of $0 so far. And I have plenty of evidence that there are both tons of visitors and actual users.

For some reason that needs to change industry-wide, software is essentially not valued at all. It’s not even valued enough to “risk” a measly few bucks up front on an App Store (even though people will shovel more to Starbucks in a single day).

I am fortunate that I don’t “need” the extra income but I imagine many developers really do. (And even if they didn’t, these things take serious time and intelligence to build, and it’s reasonable to assume people want compensation.)