I agree that things stop being a commodity, when art gets involved. But this art can also be factored in as a cost - like say the difference in costs relating to hiring a chef and a simple cook. This cost can also be factored in when arriving upon a price.

Depending on whether one wants to not go hungry (or) have some decent enough food (or) experience dinner, they can choose a category of food and price point.

So at last, price = cost + profit is still valid.

Unlike in cooking, the effort put in to creating software is one-time effort, whether you do it for a single person as a professional service (or) if you can make it generic enough for reuse (or) with if can be built with multi-tenant capability, along with online customization features. The talent level differs for each kind of deliverable, but it can at last be factored in as a cost.

This cost is becoming relatively much lesser, when compared to the recurring costs required to keep the software running on a hosted platform.

So, why not just price the software apps based on what really is a major cost factor and in terms of those cost-units (resource used), instead of trying to fit in a model which is not very natural (in terms of number of users, number of records - which is hard to do right, without over-charging most users), was what I liked to be discussed.