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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The market price for their desktop app was $9.99. How much support do you think you were really offering them?

Which brings up a great digression: the app store gold rush has left us in a situation where it's no longer feasible to sell high-maintenance, low-market software directly to consumers. Consumers will buy games and media in high volume, so you can sell those at a discount. But email clients? Photo apps? Nope. The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on eyeballs elsewhere. And even then you generally can only make it big that way as part of a larger product suite (c.f. Instagram).

I'd look to the open source world for good geek tools, honestly. I think expecting people to sell them to us in the app stores just won't work. No one will buy this stuff at the $50/seat the developers would have to charge to avoid the Google and Facebook buyouts.

Worse yet, say someone looked at sparrow dying and wanted to clone it, because it looks like there's a business there. Now they'll be pinched by people being cheap as shit on the upside and google migrating some of the best features into their presumably free iphone client on the low side. So I think google has now poisoned the well for better gmail clients on mac/ios.

I love a good pricing discussing so I wish I knew what you were saying when you say:

The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on eyeballs elsewhere.

And

No one will buy this stuff at the $50/seat the developers would have to charge to avoid the Google and Facebook buyouts.

Can you please re-state? For some reason I can't follow.

I'm not the OP, but I read those two statements something like this:

1. The minimum price to sustain development as standalone software is $50/seat.

2. Consumers will not pay $50/seat for this software.

3. Some businesses have been successful with cloud-based monetization.

4. Therefore, the best chance for success is to sell a cloud service, rather than standalone software.

That's exactly it. Though to be fair, I pulled the $50 number out of you-know-where. The point is more that the caramel-latte-priced software model only works for items with huge volume.

I bought Sparrow a long time ago. They never asked me to give them more money...

As much as they solicited.

This comment was probably pretty glib and stupid, for what it's worth.

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