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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough I wonder if they would have gotten more flack if they had just auctioned off the 100,000 licenses and see what the market would handle? I suspect they may have gotten more than $20 each and there would be less complaining as it's a totally transparent process.

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That's what I said in comments on the page -- they could have gone for a mix of eBay and Humble Indie Bundle: offer what you want, and the best 100.000 get in.

Tweetbot is currently 2nd in the Top Paid and Top Grossing store charts, behind only OSX Mountain Lion. Those $1.4m will be in the bank in a few days. People didn't balk at the price one bit; I thought about it for a few minutes, and then went f#ck it, it's the only program good enough to make me tolerate Twitter, and devs gotta eat. I suspect for some power user, $50 or even $100 would have been fair game.

Well, who knows how well the top grosser on the Mac App Store is really doing? It's not the iOS App Store. It seems to generally be dominated by Apple apps.

This probably makes more sense and they wouldn't have needed to give up a 30% cut to Apple.

Right now, I don't see how they will be able to continue to update the app once they hit 100,000 users whilst preventing the app from being purchased by new users via the Mac App Store. In order to offer updates via the MAS, your app needs to be available to sale to new customers.

They could just raise the price to $1000 once they get close to the token limit.

Or just make it free, since it's no longer useful for new users.

That's incorrect. I believe I heard this via Cable on John Gruber's 'The Talk Show,' but you can still have an app in the MAS and provide updates even if the app is not available for sale.

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