So I see a couple of clever, talented guys work hard for months and months to bring a useful, attractive app to market. And when they do, I see three kinds of response: positive, which is gratifying to me, because I like these guys and I like their app; negative, mostly bug reports, feature requests, or backlash against the existence of “yet another Twitter client”; and the inevitable cheapskates.
Gruber nailed them before the App Store was even a glimmer in our wildest dreams:
No matter what this app does, no matter who the target audience is, there are some potential users in that audience who will want to use it but who will not want to pay for it. Most of these cheapskates will not come right out and tell you this (i.e. that they don’t want to pay anything for your software). If you charge $40 per license, they will say, “This is a great app, but it’s too expensive. I’d buy it if it were $25.”
But if you had set the price at $25, they’d tell you it should be $15. If you charged $15, they’d tell you it should be $10. If you charged $10, they’d tell you it should be free.
iPhone apps are already an order of magnitude cheaper than their desktop counterparts, but the miserly bitching continues.
The devaluation of creations by consumers has been a pet peeve of mine for years: my friend Vivek used to sell CDs directly from his website, and constantly had people trying to barter him down, usually to below the point of profitability. That pisses me off, and when it’s happening to a friend, it pisses me off even more. I liked how Nik put it:
Some people can’t afford to throw many days and hours of their time into developing, maintaining and updating software without some kind of return. How hard are customers gonna low ball them? The problem is the attitude of thinking that five dollars is a lot of money for a piece of software. It seems as though everyone thinks 70 cents per download is a fair profit for the makers. You know what? Fuck you people.
You spent three hundred bucks on your fancy phone, fork over another sixty-plus every month to keep using it, but when it comes to the cost of a coffee or two to reward these guys for their hard work, suddenly you’re pinching pennies?
I shouldn’t have singled out what’s-his-face, and I should have dialed back the ire before I let my post get whisked away on the winds of rebloggers who ignored my later, softened edits in favour of strawman arguments and arrogant generalizations.
But I stand by my original position: If you think an app isn’t worth x dollars to you, don’t buy it. If you think the app isn’t worth x dollars at all—if you think the developers don’t deserve to be compensated for their work, or should be just as happy with (x−1) dollars, or (x−2) dollars—then you’re a cretin, and a blemish on humanity, and you should shut up and go fuck yourself.
