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Fuzzmeasure educational discount5/3/2023 ![]() ![]() If you price too low, you’ll have a hard time imposing a major increase. We hope to hit “pretty much on target” from the start, to avoid embarrassment and second-guessing. But such a strategy in real life could be a public-image nightmare. This is how a computer would solve the pricing problem: start high and iterate until condition “good sales” is met. There is a prevailing wisdom in marketing that “prices should only come down.” This would suggest that developers should “aim high” and then correct when nobody buys the product. But now that he’s set the pattern of a low price point, is he stuck there? Is nobody safe from the insane Cult of Too Expensive? Is Macaroni a success because of its reasonable price, or in spite of it? One nice side-effect of such a low price is that a modest rise in price, such as the one from $7.99 to $8.99 should produce a massive 12% increase in revenue. “I had people who complained Macaroni was too expensive when it was $7.99,” he told me. But even at its low price, he gets hecklers. The company’s flagship product is decidedly not a hobbyist project, and sees substantial sales to both individual and institutional buyers. His system maintenance utility, Macaroni, costs just $8.99. Tom Harrington of Atomic Bird doesn’t seem to think so. Is $19.95 that magic number for palatable consumer-oriented software? “It can’t be good!” The magic number for “palatable” wine is between $6-$12, depending on who you ask. The travesty is you won’t even try the $1 bottle of wine, despite the low investment. At what point does “bargain pricing” hurt your sales more than it helps them? And how much does this value perception depend on the context the product is stuck in? I think most would agree that the price $1 is too high for a candy bar, too low for a bottle of wine, and just about right for an MP3. Surely there is some wiggle room in the exact price, but the logic is compelling. Anything $19.95 or higher sounds like a professionally-made and supported product.” “Anything under $19.95 sounds like a hobbyist or teenager trying to subsidize their iTMS habit. In a recent email thread, Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit fame) summarized the problem of underpricing software as a matter of perception: This makes common sense, and resonates with many an aphorism: you get what you pay for, etc. In many cases, I get the sense that people got an idea in their head about how much software should cost in 1983 and haven’t adjusted for inflation since.Īnother line of thinking suggests that a product must be priced high enough to demand the respect it deserves. Not that there’s anything wrong with those lifestyle choices, but it has little to do with what represents “good value” to ordinary people. It’s not uncommon to hear people disparaging $15 products (mine among them) as “too expensive.” At some point, you have to wonder whether these people eat out of a dumpster or live out of the back of their truck. ![]() Who are these people, and who gave them access to the internet? They wouldn’t be nearly so annoying if their price wasn’t always ridiculously low. On one side of the argument we hear the endless feedback from the “Cult of Too Expensive.” These are the seemingly endless supply of irrationally whiny “potential users” who insist that a product is “good, but too expensive.” They would buy our products if only they were $5 cheaper. We’re stuck in this awkward position where we don’t necessarily have the name recognition to demand the highest prices, but we also can’t afford to “give away” the hard-earned fruits of our labor. Pricing software is one of the toughest jobs facing independent developers.
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