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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

The idea to have new features exist as unlockable extras actually is an advantage to users: if they don't need it, they still get updates for the feature set they bought.

So all that's missing is a way to give customers of "date X or later" unlockable features as part of the baseline sale.

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Except the developer takes a hit there, too. Given that not everyone needs every feature, users end up subsidizing each other's desired improvements as part of a major upgrade. On top of that, not all features have clear lines that can be drawn around them, technically or marketing-wise.

It's a great model for games and certain specific types of apps (Paper is very clever). But to push all apps onto this model is highly unrealistic.

I'm not sure if the developer necessarily takes a hit. Say I have $15 to spend on a video editing app. $10 for the initial app and $5 for the only premium feature I want results in me giving $15 to the developer (less Apple's cut etc). However if the developer adds 5 new features to the app and I have to choose between buying features that I mostly don't want and can't afford or not spending the money I'll most likey give $0 to the developer.

Similar situation with luxury features on cars: it makes business sense to sell them individually.

If you wanted/needed the feature badly enough (ie, it was a mission-critical tool), you might pay much more for an update that included your desired feature in addition to stuff you don't need (or even stuff you might not yet know that you want). Also, the extra "wasted" revenue helps pay the developer for the thankless but necessary task of under-the-hood improvements, whose costs have to absorbed elsewhere.

I'm not saying the model can never work, but it's not a good fit for every product. The developer should be able to create the relationship with their customers that they think fits best; sometimes that will be IAP, sometimes subscriptions, sometimes upgrades. There will never be "one business model to rule them all", or else we'd see all marketplaces naturally converge in that direction.

For the developer, now they need to re-sell every single feature of their app. Why would anyone choose that over just bundling them together?

1. It's an easy way to charge for new development on platforms that don't have paid upgrades.

2. It can turn be much more profitable as long as you don't just take the price you'd charge for the upgrade and divide by the number of features. Games are leading the way with this business model.

For example, IIRC League of Legends is insanely popular right now. (I want to say it's the biggest game at the moment, but I could be misremembering. Anyway.) It's free to play, but unlike most games, you don't get any permanent characters or upgrades when you start. To unlock a character, you have to buy them. Buying all the characters with money would cost almost a thousand dollars. And if you want to customize your characters so they look cool – well, that can cost several times more. Suffice it to say, Riot Games is doing pretty well for itself by unbundling as much as humanly possible.

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