Milking the loyal fan base - if they can sell at this price, why not?
Charging the same price as the Mountain Lion upgrade.
Charging the same price as the Mountain Lion upgrade.
Or we can think of it in an equally useless point of view: over a year it's just $1.67 a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee!
ML1 - Mountain Lion
Apple can rely on the fact that Mountain Lion is a yearly update, they can afford to market and promote the product, and it doubtless has a lead-in for hardware sales too.
Tweetbot on iOS is, when you consider the relative size of installation bases for iOS devices and Macs, comparably priced. You can sell an iOS Twitter client at a reduced cost because there are just so many more iOS devices out there. To justify maintaining a Mac codebase you need to charge more.
At $20 a pop, the devs clear $14, and that means Tweetbot for Mac's lifetime revenue cap is a measly 1.4 million dollars.
On a site lite hackernews, you presumably know something about the very high price of software engineering skills. Are you seriously asserting, with a straight face, that an app representing as much engineering time investment and polish as Tweetbot does is a scheme to price-gouge users, when the most revenue the devs will ever see from it is $1.4 million, lifetime, which needs to cover not just initial development costs but also ongoing maintenance and development?
If anything it's a labour of love on their part.
So for approximately 10 months work, $1.4M divided by 2 developers, so, annualized, about $1M/yr/developer.
That's not including the fact that during the same time frame, they're developing and releasing more applications (sources of revenue).
That's some labour of love, even if you factor in 3 more years of ongoing maintenance and development.
I'd love to have a labour of love that nets me around $250,000/year income as a base.
$1.4 million is the all-time, sell out all your tokens maximum, assuming 0 piracy (because every pirate takes away from that 100k token ceiling), not for 10 months of work but for 10 months of work + all work going forward. Very, very few products are sustainable when their absolute all time revenue ceiling is a paltry $1.4 million. To argue that that ceiling is too high, that they should be selling for, what, $9.99 (all time revenue ceiling: $700k) or $2.99 ($210k lifetime max) is nuts.
> I'd love to have a labour of love that nets me around $250,000/year income as a base.
Then I'd suggest building good software and charging what you're worth. By playing the "a very polished piece of software is overpriced because it costs as much as the price of having a pizza delivered" game, you're only participating in the devaluation of your own skills.
If you can sell a twitter app for 20 bucks, by all means, do it!