App Store Pricing beckyhansmeyer.com

@becky holy moly. I think you’re onto something.

@becky Yes. You are so on the money here. No pun intended.

@becky I recently replied to someone here by remembering that back in the 90s sharewere heyday, $5-10 was the general price for most non-overly-complex pieces of shareware/indie software on the Mac. Some things (like Control Strip modules) were cheaper, others (like GraphicConverter) were more expensive, but most things fell in that middle. (Note that with inflation, that’s now around $9-17 in 2019 dollars.) I don’t see any* reason today’s indie software shouldn’t be any different.

* Back in the shareware days, of course, people could try lots of software for 7 or 30 days before buying, making those purchases very palatable; you already knew the software was going to be useful/work for you before you bought. And developers could charge you again for upgrades. The App Store has flipped both of those into disincentives.

@smokey @becky As someone who sold shareware back in the 90’s, my recollection is the prices were more like $25 or more for most shareware. When the App Store came along, and the race to the bottom occurred, Mac apps were dragged down too. (For context: I currently have a $59 pro app, and a $4-10 non-auto-renewing subscription consumer app... and make more money from the the latter; I am making it up in volume.)

@dejus You may be right; it’s quite possible I mostly bought smaller utilities, as I remember that GraphicConverter was at that point the most expensive shareware app I bought (and it may have been $35 instead of $25). I have records…somewhere ;-) // @becky

@smokey Yeah, GraphicConverter was $35. My apps were priced around $20-$25.