Rationally your labor has a market value. How you negotiate your way into getting paid that (or a little over that) is up to you.
An "emotional appeal" is also known as an appeal to empathy, and humans empathize for many reasons other than personal relationships. When you hear about starving children in some far away place, you empathize, not because you know the suffering children, but because we're hard wired to protect our young. Other times, we empathize because we can identify with another person's experience.
HttpWatch is a tool for developers, made by developers. Their hope with this message is that other developers will identify with their challenges. Every developer who sells their software in the app store has struggled with the pricing question. The addition of empirical evidence to support their pricing was a nice touch.
There's always a skeptical subset of people who will not respond to any appeal. In my experience, that group is overrepresented here on HN, so I'm not surprised at the responses, but my hunch is that this message will have some positive effect for HttpWatch.
This isn't as much an emotional appeal ("please sir, can I have some more? Look as the way I'll have to live if I can't.") but more of an illustration of why more is desired and therefore why you might be considering looking elsewhere (which if you word it right won't be taken as a threat by a reasonable boss and/or HR person, rather as an honest explanation of your needs and thought process).
That can in some cases be a winning strategy for negotiating a raise. If your living expenses are too high relative to your salary and you're worth more than your current pay, your boss might give you a raise out of fear you'll leave. That logic doesn't carry over to app pricing though.
Like that photographer dude on HN a while ago who defined the cost of one photograph by the equipment cost, and the plane ticket required to go there?
With this kind of logic, you should bill your customers your years of education, from the time you started to read, and effectively charge them millions of dollars per product. This is so ridiculous I don't even know if there's a name for this kind of fallacy.
Sometimes the restrictions on supply are artificial, sometimes they are natural. Medicine are a good example of both effects. Being a doctor is hard, and requires a lot of education. But there are also limitations on how nurses and other medical practicioners can work (dental hygienists can't clean your teeth unless they are supervised by a dentist).
I think the fallacy here is that you extrapolate the things you mention to 'millions of dollars per product'. I don't think its ridiculous logic to attach a premium to your 'market value' based on how much (time, money) you invested in your education or side projects, and I also don't think it's ridiculous at all to account for equipment cost and travel expenses to determine the cost of (for instance) a photograph. In fact, I think it's perfectly normal, and I assume the similar logic was used in determining the price of about every product or service I buy. Usually costs like these are amortized over a large range of products ('photos', to stay with your example) and/or a large number of sales, so the numbers don't add up to 'millions of dollars per product'.
It is ridiculous, because your equipment is not disposable, and is going to serve for multiple pictures (possibly hundred of thousands before it dies out) and your trip was not just for that particular picture, but for other purposes as well (relaxing, tourism, etc...). It seems very far fetched to justify the price of a single photograph this way.
Also, if someone wanted me to fly somewhere to do a project for them, I am absolutely going to charge them for the plane tickets. Travel is difficult and costly, there's not only the cost of the ticket itself but the opportunity cost of all the things you could be doing instead of dealing with flying somewhere.
I'm not sure if you have read the post I am referring to, but that was not the case. The guy was not asked to go and fly somewhere to take a picture. He just said his picture was worth x thousands dollars because he took it with x,y equipment and travelled to that place to take it by himself.
I'm just saying that's not how pricing usually works. You don't charge for your costs, your charge at the price you can sell, and whether that's above your fixed costs is only a matter of whether your work is valuable or not. If I were a complete noob with expensive equipment, my market value would still be zero.
Of course the investment in certain skills needs to be paid.
It is easier to understand why software is "expensive" when one factors in all monthly costs involved in paying bills, office personal, developers, sales and marketing to produce the said software.
I think you get it wrong. You are not being paid for the years of studies you did. If you learn about petrol extraction in a country that has no oil and if you are not willing to move, your market value is exactly zero. The market defines your value, not your education. That's precisely what tons of students don't understand and get severely pissed off when they don't get the job and the salary they expected.
Not only you do, but in a lot of countries it is mandatory too.
People with university degrees earn X more than people without, by law. This for example happens with civil servants in lots of countries (different, published pay scales if you have a university degree). In some places it's also encoded in the minimum wage a profession commands.
(I worked at the salary department of a major ministry in my country, and I know of similar laws elsewhere too).
Great, you just defined one of the root causes of unemployment. Artificially fixed value. The same thing occurs when you artificially define minimum wages: home owners stop renting their properties because it does not make sense for them anymore.
If people and especially employees, can screw other people, they will. Laws against slave and child labor, and women inequality in pay, are also some ways in which we introduced protections against those abubses. For some people those protections were "artificially defined" too (e.g "why take the children out of the labour pool and artificially inflate the value of adult labor").
>The same thing occurs when you artificially define minimum wages: home owners stop renting their properties because it does not make sense for them anymore.
The correlation doesn't make much sense. As long as there are people willing to rent their properties, they'd rent them. If anything, with people getting some guaranteed minimum wage, instead of being paid less, there even be more people that can afford to rent.
Or is the idea here that people would not be employed because of the strict miminum wage? In actual life I haven't seen that. It's more like employees are paying people less just because they can, than paying them less because they cannot afford to pay them more. Minimum wage at least puts a cap to that.
Wrong word used up there, it was not "wages" I was refering to, it was "rent prices".
"It will be 300$, madam."
"That's way too much", the woman replied, "it took you only 10 minutes to do it !"
"That's where you are wrong madam, it took me all my life."
Of course you should factor in your education et al into the price you charge for your product.
Fallacy? That's what every professional I know does. He factors in his qualifications (education etc), into the prices he charges.