> I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software (which I might add, is entirely hosted on iCloud infrastructure).
...does this person understand how software works? Yes, the marginal cost of providing software to a particular person is almost always very low, sometimes so low it basically rounds down to zero. But you're not just charging to pay for the costs of delivering the software, but for developing it, too. And, of course, some goes to profit, which is perfectly reasonable in a capitalist word.
With businesses who are mainly reselling a thing, looking at it as "cost of thing + X% profit" is a perfectly reasonable way to frame things. There's only so much value a retailer or middleman can add, and generally there are competitors that could offer the same item. But when it comes to software, each individual item costs basically nothing to provide, so that kind of analysis fails and you have to accept that the price is essentially arbitrary.