Show HN: I finally released that sheet music app I keep yammering about

1) Free users will destroy you in ratings, unless you are a universally known brand that is basically repackaging a pint-sized version of their popular website/application. I've seen people at the "Free" level say "I LOVE THIS APP BUT IT HAS THIS ONE SMALL PROBLEM SO I HATE IT AND GIVE IT ONE STAR YOU CAN'T PAY ME TO USE IT LULZY!" Freeloaders love free, but they will incessantly take advantage of it and are generally ungrateful, which shows in their ratings.

2) At .99 cents, you get casual and one-off users who know the value of their hard-earned dollar and will expect a relatively unreasonable amount of value because of loss-leader devs that price their complex apps that way to move up the charts. The 99-centers will conflate purchasing an item with an expectation of constant content refreshes or perfection in updates, or they will penalize. It's a false economy to try to appease these customers. Better to just cross fingers and hope to make it up in volume (or in-app purchases).

3) At 1.99-2.99, things start to get interesting. Your reviewers begin to appreciate the decisions you've made in the apps design or execution, give you actual usable (albeit terse and/or a bit angry) feedback, and ratings are a little higher overall.

4) At 3.99+, you are either a AAA game dev porting your blockbusters down to the iphone/ipod touch, or you're an indie that has built a following by selling volume pricing at first and then raising it up once you've cemented your position on the charts. Your reviewers are spectacularly verbose in their heaping of praise on you, and offer almost QA-level bug reports that you can use for your updates.

I think the sweet spot for someone starting in the app store is $1.99-2.99 US, plus a "lite" version with in-app purchaseable upgrade to the full version. Perceived value with a teaser freebie. If your app is at all useful/fun, then it'll gain an audience. I think alot of people just saw the "goldmine" app store articles and thought they could make an app that was just like iFart or iShoot "but cooler" and failed miserably.

Yup. I'll go over what its like for the app that I work on, but, what muhfuhkuh said is very accurate as well.

I work on an app thats in the app store for $1.99. We see some bad reviews (people requesting features we already have, complaining about something thats out of our control (lack of backgrounding's a big one), etc). But, for the most part, the reviews are pretty good; our 4 and 5 star reviews combined amount to around double the 1, 2 and 3 star reviews.

In contrast to some of our competitors applications; one is $1.99 now, but was anywhere from $.99 to $3.99. It was on sale for a bit at $.99 and has some pretty bad reviews - lots of impulse buys and people not knowing how to use the application. It has more 1 and 2 star reviews then 3, 4 and 5 stars combined.

Another of our competitors applications is $4.99. It doesn't have nearly as many reviews, but the ones it does are "higher" quality. Maybe two or three reviews < 3 stars. But, only 20-25 reviews in total.