Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies

startupproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 59 posts

Re: How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies

#3

Post by bad_user »

A funny thing happens to me and not by choice - whenever I'm searching for something on Android's Marketplace, I tend to look at paid apps first whenever I have a specific need and know what I want, even though I'm a cheap bastard. Unfortunately many paid apps that I tried to buy are not available in my country and I don't know why devs feel the need to limit their apps to a certain geographic area, while keeping free apps unlimited.

The reason being that most free apps on Android's Marketplace (and even on iTunes) are weekend hacks - unusable interface, breaking on updates / unmaintained or filled with spam or limitations. It's the return of shareware - and whenever I can't find something suitable I tend to say "fuck it, I'll just do something by myself", instead of waisting time with all the crap out there. And I did - I created my own phone calls / SMS blocker.

Re: How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies

#5

Post by swombat »

bad_user wrote: post #3

A funny thing happens to me and not by choice - whenever I'm searching for something on Android's Marketplace, I tend to look at paid apps first whenever I have a specific need and know what I want, even though I'm a cheap bastard. Unfortunately many paid apps that I tried to buy are not available in my country and I don't know why devs feel the need to limit their apps to a certain geographic area, while keeping fre…

> whenever I'm searching for something on Android's Marketplace, I tend to look at paid apps first whenever I have a specific need and know what I want, even though I'm a cheap bastard.

I do the same in the Apple App Store. I rarely ever browse through free apps.

Prior to the App Store, I also very rarely bought any software. Since iPhones and iPads and all that stuff came out, I'm buying a good 1-3 apps per month on average, every single month. I'm kind of amazed at that.

Re: How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies

#6

Post by radarsat1 »

This works in many markets. Look at clothing labels for instance. Take a fairly plain shirt or something, put a tiny logo on it, double the price. It works.

My personal example is that I have several music recordings downloadable for free from my website. No one ever listens to them as far as I know. At least I've never randomly received feedback from my music website. I got a record label to carry a track once, sold as MP3 for a low price, and all of a sudden the track hits some top-10s, etc. People pay more attention when you attach a price tag.

In all honesty, I actually think this would be a good approach for open-source software funding: open the source, but package it up nicely and sell binaries. I suspect that people would buy, even if someone else comes along with their own binary; include a trademark clause perhaps to stop them from naming it the same thing.

Re: How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies

#9

Post by wccrawford »

I think there's more at play here than just the old 'higher price = higher quality' thing.

When I see '$9.99' I think 'bargain bin software'. That's because every computer retailer has an entire rack of really crappy software and each one of them is $9.99.

Oddly enough, $10 doesn't have the same stigma. It's probably the lack of marketing BS.

Also, people expect a product to be priced according to value. If it's underpriced, they're going to assume it's less useful than they require and may not even waste time on a trial.

Post reply on HN