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

Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

joshlehman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 207 posts

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#81

Post by crazygringo »

Wow. The negativity of the comments here to this post is astounding.

I personally find this post very insightful. Just yesterday, I bought the EA Tetris app for $0.99. I played it for three minutes, and decided I hated the "touch" interface for Tetris. It isn't Tetris at all. And it pissed me off that I paid money for something useless. It doesn't matter if I paid $20 for it or $0.99. It just makes me feel like a fool, like I got taken in.

When the author says "Your $1 App is a Total Gamble", that's exactly the point. And it has nothing to do with it being an app or an online purchase. It's the same way I feel about buying a new snack for $0.99 and discovering it tastes like cardboard, or a shirt from a new store that turns out to shrink unexpectedly in the wash.

People hate buying things they'll regret, particularly when they're buying blind, or have no idea of the risks. It's psychological, not necessarily economic, but it's true. And in app stores, there's rarely a trusted brand to rely on, or anything at all, to tell you you're not being taken for a fool. Customer reviews tend to be worthless, and you're not going to spend 20 minutes researching a $0.99 purchase. So you just won't buy it period, because you hate feeling like a fool. Psychologically, it makes perfect sense.

But what if the app stores switched to a subscription model? Pay $10/mo for unlimited apps. Suddenly, no regret. Pay developers based on their proportion of hourly usage across all phones. All of a sudden, no regret, and developers are paid based on people finding their apps useful, instead of their ability to convince people to buy them...

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#82

Post by zmmmmm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #49

There are a few more stumbling blocks to purchase as well: - What of my billing information / what billing hassles am I opening myself up for? Considering that app purchases are frequently tied to both credit cards and your comms/telco vendor (and often other integrated services), you're putting a lot at risk. - What respect (or lack) does this app have for my privacy? I'm very conscious of what closed-source resourc…

Yes, the point here: the actual non-monetary "cost" of a purchase to many end users is much higher than 99c. I would say personally that the cost of any app I have to purchase is $2-3 at least. Therefore all that pricing the app at 99c has done is brought the cost down to the floor imposed by other factors.

So app developers need to judge and price their apps comensurate with the real "effective" cost the user is going to pay anyway to install their app. Pricing less than that, or at least deluding yourself that pricing less than that gives you a competitive advantage, is pointless and sometimes counterproductive (in the absence of other information I will judge the quality of your app partly by how it is priced).

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#83

Post by phil »

The operative difference between buying cups of coffee and paid apps is actually this:

If you try to spend $50 on cups of coffee you'll quickly become twitchy and have to stop, but if you keep pressing the Buy button in the app store you can easily get the thing done.

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#84

Post by crazygringo »

DougBTX wrote: post #31
mmahemoff wrote: post #16

I think there's a deeper cause behind many of these arguments. People hate to feel ripped off, to a degree that is highly irrational if you assess the impact in purely utilitarian terms. Even a billionaire will feel a bit shitty after paying $0.99 for a lemon. There are various reasons why this happens. Partly it's the fact they wasted time researching and purchasing the app, and people's time is usually more importa…

Lets take it that people are worried about being ripped off. If it was easy to return an app for a refund from Apple, would you expect the baseline $0.99 price to go up?

I totally would.

I purchased Dark Sky a couple weeks ago on the recommendation of a friend. I thought the $3.99 price tag was way too steep for what is mostly likely another crappy app, and I would never have bought it if my friend hadn't sung its praises.

And it's now one of the most useful apps on my phone, and if it had been a 14-day free trial, I'd happily pay $20 for it.

If free trials were available, like are common in the desktop software world, I think app prices could go waaay up.

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#85

Post by mistercow »

erickhill wrote: post #74
mistercow wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and second rate beans Actually, the tragedy of it is that Starbucks uses pretty good beans. If you buy their brand of beans and make the coffee yourself, you can make a damned good cup of coffee. But Starbucks apparently has standardized entirely the wrong procedure for using those beans, so that the end product tastes like they accidentally dropped a bouillon cube in it.

While it is easy for some to slam Starbucks coffee for taste , the truth is nearly every cafe you go to will have a healthy business - and often perpetual lines - of paying customers. Quality is subjective, and the entire experience Starbucks brings is what the urban masses are looking for. For that matter, take a long road trip, and if you happen to see a Starbucks logo on an exit sign, more often than not you're go…

I don't go on road trips without a significant supply of my concentrated aqueous solution of caffeine and theanine, and my handy concentrated flavoring so that I can make energy drinks on the go. So no, I wouldn't surrender to Starbucks in that scenario.

But I realize that my habits are not exactly typical.

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#86

Post by Schwolop »

dasil003 wrote: post #66
andrewfelix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. "Starbucks Craftsmanship" ? Please. Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee. I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbuc…

I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress their garbage before you could throw yours in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there. Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all th…

I'm an Aussie coffee afficionado, and the best coffee I ever had in London was at Monmouth. No idea of the address, but it was about 5mins walk from the modern art museum, on that side of the Thames, near a food market. As if that'll help... :-)

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#87

Post by zht »

crazygringo wrote: post #81

Wow. The negativity of the comments here to this post is astounding. I personally find this post very insightful. Just yesterday, I bought the EA Tetris app for $0.99. I played it for three minutes, and decided I hated the "touch" interface for Tetris. It isn't Tetris at all. And it pissed me off that I paid money for something useless. It doesn't matter if I paid $20 for it or $0.99. It just makes me feel like a foo…

Or users can be allowed to refund their apps

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#88

Post by lobster_johnson »

dasil003 wrote: post #66
andrewfelix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. "Starbucks Craftsmanship" ? Please. Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee. I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbuc…

I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress their garbage before you could throw yours in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there. Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all th…

> Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies,

In New York, Swedish coffee (of all things) seems to be the up-and-coming thing:

http://www.fikanyc.com/about

http://www.konditorinyc.com/

No idea why. Scandinavia is exotic and hip these days, probably. Then again, a lot of new Swedish things are popping up, like Swedish pizza places (which, if you haven't had it, mostly revolves around unexpected toppings such as banana, cabbage and kebab meat).

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#89

Post by gerts »

fleitz wrote: post #34
mmahemoff wrote: post #16

I think there's a deeper cause behind many of these arguments. People hate to feel ripped off, to a degree that is highly irrational if you assess the impact in purely utilitarian terms. Even a billionaire will feel a bit shitty after paying $0.99 for a lemon. There are various reasons why this happens. Partly it's the fact they wasted time researching and purchasing the app, and people's time is usually more importa…

Yes, it reminds me of a story about a guy named Joe who spent hours on the phone with the phone company and had the erroneous billing charges removed saving him $11. Joe tells his neighbour Bob of his ordeal and how he got his $11 back, Bob has the same problem and asks whether the Joe could take care of his billing problems with the phone company for $11, but Joe refuses insisting he isn't being paid enough to deal…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

The goal is to make it not worth the oppressor's effort to rip you off.

Re: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy

#90

Post by tptacek »

yaakov34 wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #47

Horrifying. The point about the coffee cup comparison isn't that cups of coffee are the benchmark experience for product pricing; if that were the case, my next root canal would cost $0.20. The point of the coffee cup comparison is marginal utility : the money you spend on an expensive cup of coffee almost certainly has very little utility at the margin, because you are happy to chuck it away for a bad cup of coffee.…

I think that the reluctance to pay for anything online is what explains prices like $0.99 - the developers are trying to pitch their apps as "almost free" or "just about free" - sneaking in under that impedance. The whole point of that price is to send a signal that this doesn't cost real money. So this price point is not accidental or unexpected. How developers can get out of this is a different question...

There are people here with much better scientific data to argue from, but my sense is that this is exactly the wrong strategy: the biggest hump is from "free" to "pay", and most points on the spectrum from 0.01 to "whatever a DVD movie costs" are similarly hard to sell at, all else being equal (market sabotage by people selling apps at 99 cents notwithstanding; don't build apps that will compete at 99 cents).
Post reply on HN