How to price your iPhone app out of existence | Hacker News Reader

How to price your iPhone app out of existence

losingfight.com

35 pointsboucher43 comments

His comments on undercutting Sega are exactly incorrect. You, a random developer, have little expenses and can stand to make $50k off of an app. Sega, on the other hand, has a ton of expenses, spends probably millions just to make a Super Monkey Ball, and can't afford that.

He may be right but I would have liked to see a deeper understanding of price elasticity of demand, as well as some data to back up some of his claims.

right, i'm not sure why the author feels like he has a god-given right to make $50,000/year no matter what kind of iphone app he/she develops.

go ask any of the top 10 iphone application developers -- i don't think any of them are having trouble with the 50k/year barrier. the marketplace will be the same as the web: the majority of attention goes to a small number of sites. just because i put out a website of marginal value and charge $9.99 doesn't automatically mean i'll be making $50k/year -- the issue is a lot more difficult than that.

He didn't say that he has a right to make $50,000 year no matter what. He said that if you are not going to make $50,000 a year then your company is not going to survive, so you need to find a way to make at least that much money.

How much money the top 10 developers make is inconsequential to all the other developers that aren't in the top 10. The top 10 will always be filled mass-market applications. Most developers aren't developing applications with mass-market appeal.

He's still assuming that maintaining one app will consume a person's entire capacity for the lifetime of the app.

One app does not have to be your sole source of income.

It's a lot like how one-off pieces of art always seem really expensive, but the fact of the matter is that to make that art someone has to be able to support themselves doing something that typically doesn't really scale.

What the appstore needs is not higher prices, it needs fewer developers: if there are 20 apps doing X then each only makes enough money to get by, but if there were 2 apps doing X they both could invest into making new features. What we need is a serious recession with a healthy round of bakrupcies and mergers.

More people losing their jobs means more people with free time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job. Plus, a poor economy lowers the market for these unnecessary goods. So it is likely the result of a serious recession is more competition for fewer customers.

Apple could reduce the number of iPhone developers by charging more for the SDK, or by charging a larger transaction fee. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did increase the costs substantially sometime soon. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see the standard transaction fee increase substantially, with tiered percentages based on price and/or volume (e.g. start $1 flat transaction fee + 30% of the price for the first 1,000 copies, then reduce the percentage gradually for each 10^nth copy).

  More people losing their jobs means more people with free
  time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job

It could swing either way, I agree.

I disagree. Having fewer developers does nobody any good - you would have to introduce artificial barriers to the App Store, which is unfair to small businesses. Customers also lose the ability to have competing apps.

What we need is a better visibility system. Similar to HN, Digg, etc, where the best apps find a way to "float to the top", but never permanently (i.e. an extremely popular app won't sit on the Top 50 list forever). We also need better integration with this system from the web side of things - so app authors can generate exposure for their app not only on the App Store, but also by themselves through their own marketing.

The other post by the same author is a lot better: http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/07/can-you-make-a-li...

I don't think its possible to raise the prices. I mean sure you are supposed to compete on things other than price...but most iPhone apps aren't rocket science. Anything you can come up with, can get copied very quickly. So why would someone pay $9.99 for your app, when they can pay $.99 for an app that has all your features, on top of whatever else they come up with

If you build a good app for $20.00 then somebody might clone it for $2.00. But, will they survive on their clone? Probably not, if they are living in a rich country. You just need to outlast these cheap knock-offs until their developers get bored and move onto something else. It might be a constant stream of knock-offs, but the longer you last, the better the reputation you build. Reputation is worth a lot, especially with people whose lives don't revolve around software development.

A good developer in SW Asia, SE Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe will always have an advantage over you regarding price. $10,000 or $20,000 a year goes a long way in those places (I lived in Thailand for $1K a month without even trying to be cheap). But, that is the case with other parts of the software market and somehow Asian, African, and Eastern European companies haven't taken over the while software development market yet. Probably in the long term they will, but that is years off.

Right, but the same could be said about the USA. My monthly burn is much higher than $1000 :-( BUT, living in rural Minnesota as I do, it really isn't hard to lower your living cost below $1000 if you want to and are single (When I lived in the city of Minneapolis, my monthly bills including mortgage totalled probably around $1,500). Being American and living here in the US gives me a huge advantage on understanding our culture and being able to design a UI that appeals to Americans and to be able to support them that a smart Thai doesn't have.

I am seriously thinking of getting into iPhone development even though I've only seen one once :-) Why? Because I already design & build mobile Bluetooth hardware and I can see many apps where the mobility of an iPhone would result in a great product. I don't care about consumer apps, but there are tons of small business applications that have been waiting for this kind of connectivity in your pocket!

While you could get by making $1000 a month in Minnesota, that isn't sustainable for the long term since you could just go get a programming job where you earn over $1000 a week. If you aren't making $100,000 a year developing your application then you are losing a lot of money once you factor in opportunity cost.

Regarding competition from our foreign friends: I think we are both thinking the same way here. Right now, we don't really have to worry about ultra-cheap competition too much. Eventually, I think we will--the cultural advantages you speak of are a short-term advantage, not a long-term one. My Thai friends already know a lot about Western culture because they deal with us all day long in Thailand. Whatever they don't know, they can learn. But, almost none of my Thai friends could afford to buy an iPhone right now; even if they could, they work 80 hours a week at their job so they wouldn't have time to develop anything for it. But, slowly, all of that is changing.

Yup. The $1,000/month comment is only to show that it can be done, not that I'd want to only have that level of income. But it provides flexibility by letting you start small. I need to keep my day job for a while because it will be a long hard slog before my side business can come remotely close to providing me the income I need :-(

The stuff I build is industrial monitoring devices, so I purchase off the shelf Bluetooth-serial interfaces and incorporate them into my products. Google the Sena (Parani) and Roving Networks products. They are easy to use and reliable. Being able to monitor a process without needing to run cable to it is a killer app waiting to happen!

If you spend one month on an app and make ~8k from it your doing fine. The trick is to only spend ~1month per 8k of profit.

What is needed to get started with Bluetooth hardware development? Do you have any suggestions for finding more info about it? Thanks!

This post seems to gloss over the point about VALUE.

Sure, sell your app for $9.99 if you want. But it'd better be worth it.

And almost all of the apps ON the app store are little quick pieces of fluff, barely even worth 99 cents.

Even the better pieces of software are mostly timesavers or memory aids, games notwithstanding.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that there is this expection to spend a few weeks and crank out an app, then live on it for a year, when I just don't think this could be the case.

iPhone apps just aren't as big or useful as desktop apps. I'm not saying there aren't useful apps, but come on, you're not gonna see Photoshop or Visual Studio or.. World or Warcraft for the iPhone any time soon.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that a lot of apps I could use can be replicated just by opening the browser and going to a website. And that one app I WOULD buy, I can't, without jailbreaking. (Ah, Podcaster. C'est la vie. And that app is only 4.99 too.)

Is a ring tone worth $3? To many people, it is.

Some of the apps are genuinely useful - there's an app that will capture a sample of a song and identify it. I would pay at least a few bucks for that. Maybe not $10, but $5 easily.

But on the store it's free, without ads. I don't get it. That's throwing money away.

Don't they use affiliate links for when you purchase the song from the (iTunes?) music store.

They could've done both...

Omnifocus for iPhone was 19.99 and worth every penny. I could of paid 199.99 and it would of been good value. This app lets me offload the kinds of thinking my brain is bad at into something I always carry. You can't put a price on having that in your pocket.

I'd hesitate to say I had any desktop apps more useful then omnifocus iPhone, which effects me more like a neural upgrade from a sci fi novel then a cell phone app. iPhone apps could be like primitive cyborg upgrades with a primitive MMI solution grafted onto the part where the human interacts with the machine part.

I hope people support apps with high prices and really cool stuff gets developed. the problem isn't price or value or anything like that, it's that no one has any interesting vision of what the future of this phone could hold.

"it could of been" is written "it could have been", and "which effects me more" is written "which affects me more". Do you also say those words the same way?

yeah, I can't tell some words apart. Hooked on phonics phucked me up.

I also had speech disorders and couldn't talk so others understood me till I was four. There are still some words I never say right. I could give a shit. I lost enough sleep over it.

Are you one of the idiots who thinks spelling indicates intelligence? All U do correcting otherz is show how 1950s yur thinking iz.

Most spelling mistakes don't mean a thing, but when I read people who write 'of' and 'effect', I assume it's because they don't read a lot. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

When i read people who assume intelligence has anything to do with perfectly mimicing others systematically, I assume it's because they read so much they can't think for themselves, and stick so closely to analyzing the text that they don't engage the ideas.

People making systematic mistakes is why we don't all speak shakespearian. It's how the DNA of ideas evolves. I'z skateboarden on yur sidewak, levin u behind. Yur Rulez u wasted yur life mastezing our obsoletest. Possible realities are like a fractal wave and evolving languages holographically in the 21st century is more useful then rigidly adhering to rules made by 20th century monkeys thinking 19th century ways. Can u deal with it, grandpa?

I don't mind when people use 'u' or I'z, or anything like that. But affect and effect are two different words entirely. People who say 'U' don't mistakenly write 'Me'. It's not a spelling error, it's a meaning error. You mean to say one word, you say another. In my english accent, 'effect' and 'affect' are pronounced completely differently. This may not be the same for you, which is why you make the mistake.

The same with 'of'. You picked another word that means something different and put it in there - you didn't just misspell it.

There is nothing wrong with bad spelling - I'm not very good at spelling either. But it's confusing if you substitute words with other words that mean something different, but in your accent sound the same.

The way I speak, those words don't sound the same, and your sentence becomes very confusing. It's only because I've seen this mistake a few times on the internets that I know what is meant.

if you want to read people with this change in their language, you'll learn to adapt.

When I watch british humor, I don't always get it, but I don't expect them to change to be more like me.

There is a correct way to spell, and there is a wrong way. You, my dear sir, are doing it wrong. Don't expect the world to come round to your way of spelling anytime soon.

Ye pine fore days long gone. I dost hope thou ist right and spellings shant e're change, Marcus.

Noone can think of a word that evolved in our lifetime already?

What do you all think of our graphing calculator app, Grafly (http://grafly.com)? Is it worth $9.99? We think it is, in that there's nothing like it on any other platform at any price.

Like all the "please rate my web site" posts, I'm interested in what HN denizens think.

Thanks.

It looks cool, but only for a particular small market. Have you figured out how to reach the relevant market yet?

Not yet; that's what we're working on. The initial response was strong, but, like most apps, sunk quickly into the morass as the AppStore became overwhelmed with lots of silly little apps.

What's the market size for physical graphing calculators?

I'm sorry to say, but I don't perceive it to be useful at all. I'm probably in your target demographic - college student in engineering, and I have to tell you that anyone who's going to be doing any sort of work with graphing calculators would prefer to buy one than use their iPhone. Here's why:

- Physical buttons: when you're chewing through problems you absolutely MUST have physical buttons with tactile feedback. Like the calculator app on the iPhone (the default one) the buttons are way too small to even begin operating quickly.

- Battery life. My exams are often 3-4 hours long, and an iPhone would not be allowed as a legal calculator. Even if it were, the iPhone would have trouble holding a charge through the entire exam.

I just don't see much of a market for it. At a lower price point maybe - I see this app as being useful for possibly one-off equations, but nobody who needs this sort of software will use this app as their primary graphing calculator.

Now, what I would gladly pay for is a graphing calculator software that comes with a USB keypad. I have my graphing calculator with me always, but sometimes it's slow and the screen sucks. It would be wonderful to have the friendly physical user interface of the calculator and the power of the PC.

Thanks for that feedback!

The physical buttons argument is a good one.

I don't think the battery life issue is a real one--when you're not actively calculating a new graph, the app is doing very little. I suppose we should actually benchmark using it for 3-4 hours at a time. Can't argue about legal calculators.

Though saying "friendly [physical] UI" seems like an oxymoron to me--physical graphing calculators have some of the worst graphics I've ever seen.

I think the author addresses the point about value decently enough. He says that you'd better build an app that's worth what you're charging, or you're going to og out of business.

The comparison between iphone apps and desktop apps is strange to me. I don't think anyone would actually want to have photoshop on an iphone. Desktop computers and mobile devices are obviously used in different contexts and thus their software have different criteria for usefulness.

I don't think I have a ceiling on the price I would pay for an iPhone business/productivity app. I would pay hundreds of £/$/€ if the app made me that much in return.

Target market comes into play in this case. Businesses make decisions this way, individuals don't.

smart ones do.

i bought beejiveIM for $16, it kicks ass and is worth every penny

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