You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whatever it takes.
On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.
This is something I hadn't fully considered. One of the biggest expenses in running a wedding-related business is advertising. Unlike other purchases, wedding-related stuff is only purchased once in a lifetime (well, twice or thrice these days in America, but you get the idea).
Thus, brides and grooms rely on the opinions and advice of friends - word-of-mouth promotion is key. But ultimately, heavy advertising is the only way to reliably get information about your product out to the general public. And the App Store is a great form of free advertising (well, not counting the cut Apple takes), especially if you make it into one of the "Top" lists.
Not split testing the sale price though, it will be free. (It's just too hard to get people to buy an app outright) I want to split test in-app purchases. I think this should be fairly straightforward to implement. The only downside is in the app store 2 different items would show as top in-app purchases with different prices. People might be upset about that, but I doubt anyone would notice.
(Note: I had "pro" as much as the next version, but seems better than a multi-hundred dollar DJ)
If you price this at $25, you'll lose that group of people that were looking to save money, (you could argue that at $25 it's still cheaper than a wedding planner).
Not every bride is foolish enough to think that everything will be perfect. The more money you have the more 'perfect' it can be. Those on a budget will opt for a $5 DJ that can get them as close to perfect as their money will allow.
That's exactly my point, when your competition isn't even anywhere in the neighborhood, you might as well raise your prices. A bride-to-be isn't going to see a $25 wedding DJ app as being expensive; she's going to see it as being 1/10th of what an actual wedding DJ would cause. You said people are only willing to pay for wedding-related services - well, this is replacing a wedding-related service, and you have to consider the competition when determining pricing.
And I don't think it's only wedding-related services that cost a lot. There are plenty of purchases associated with weddings (clothing, food, etc.) that are way overpriced.
> Not every bride is foolish enough to think that everything will be perfect.
They don't all have to be that foolish, there just has to be a big enough group of them that you have a solid customer base. In this situation, I think that's definitely the case.
It would also be good to have paid for content - like pre-chosen track listings, affiliate sales would be high for this too!
Pricing it at $25 would be a disaster. You can bet the barn on that.
A DJ will cost something like 50 - 100x that.
But a DJ is more than the money; they control the tempo/crowd for the other things like garter toss, cake, parent/child dances.
I could ask why a developer in California is soo much more than a developer overseas - and they answer would also be they are kind of a like, but you get what you pay for.
There was a controversy a while back about how Target figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her dad did (based on her purchases) and started sending her ads for baby products. The reason why they did this is because people don't shop around for the best deals on everyday items, not really. People think they're getting the best deal, but they're actually trapped in their habits.
One of the few times when these habits are reshaped is when a baby is born, because newfound parents suddenly start buying a lot of new stuff, but don't have a lot of free time to research the options. By detecting customers who will become parents in the near future and sending them specially targeted advertising/discounts ahead of time for new products that they'll need, you can snag them as customers for years to come.