15.99 is too expensive, IMO, but I guess you can make that decision based on sales data. I would experiment with 4.99.
Something else a lot of people don't realize is that mouse acceleration is turned on in OSX and it's 'impossible' to disable without an app like USB Overdrive. Mouse accel is terrible for gaming -- especially FPS. I would add this feature to your product and call it out.
Having sold a SAAS app for far too little for far too long, I can tell you from my experience under pricing is a fast track to losing your hair and your shirt.
At $4.99 how many pre-sale/support emails are you willing to answer? At 4.99 how much marketing can you do? At 4.99 there's just not much room for profit assuming you have to do these tasks.
The reality is that as soon as someone opens their wallet and buys your software they think you're their bitch for life. They don't consider HOW much they paid, only that they paid.
Ironically, I've also found the people who want the app the most are:
As a software developer, I find it depressing that people would find 16$ (about 15 minutes of billable work?) too much for an application that, presumably, would be used all the time by people who need high precision pointing.
It's depressing but it's the reality of the Mac App Store. Huge companies are shipping games for under 10 bucks, so even though it's sad, you have to scale your price with the overall economics.
On the iOS App Store it's even worse. I actually heard a good quote once: "if your app is amazing, make it 99-cents. If it's shit, make it $2.99."
Perhaps, if you were expecting to sell one copy @ $16. But your argument is invalid at internet scale. $.99 games sell millions of volume.
I'm not going to spend $14.99 on it because there are alternative products for cheaper or free. Demand will dictate the price, I simply suggested that 4.99 might be a better price point but that he should look at the data first.
It's not a game, though. It's a professional utility for gainfully employed designers, who can either expense it to their MegaCorp, or if they're independent, consider it an investment in their career.
Think about how much the Adobe Suite costs. $16 is not too much for this audience.
My first knee jerk reaction was similiar - to grandparent - this app looks so simple, that with $15 price it seems you want to break even with 20 copies sold.
Nothin wrong with that, but it just seems too expansive for the effort it seems to take to make something like that.
Probably it's my inner optimistic programmer speaking, I can believe it was much more difficult to make this than I predict, but that was my first reaction - maybe it would be usefult to you to know.
Anyway, good luck. I wish I finish my game someday, and will have my shot at being entrepreneur.
BTW: for developer in small Polish city $15 is 2-3 hours of work
Agreed. If you were to add up the number of seconds a designer spends chasing that pixel color with the color picker, or drawing that selection/slice bounding box, or selecting that path handle... I'm sure it adds up over the year. Not to mention, there will be an immense amount of satisfaction derived from having overcome these obstacles time and time again.
It seems to me that if you really want to experiment with this niche, price the product according to the value those customers will obtain from it.
I think $15.99 could potentially be too cheap. There are a finite number of developers who actually pay for stuff. It would be an interesting experiment to raise the price up to $29.99 and see if the sales change.
With a higher price, you may be able to advertise in ways previously unthinkable because your margins will be so much higher on every sale.
Yes, I understand most people program games here, but this isn't a game. It is a tool, and Adobe has proven that people will pay a lot for a tool.
BTW, as far as competition is concerned, your primary competition is WACOM Tablets which are much, much better for editing than the mouse.
* I will concede that I do not know if it is too cheap or too expensive, but I will say that I have not read a valid argument on HN today that proves it is too expensive. I think it is just as valid to say it may be too cheap.
It got approved Thursday and I havent done anything before today. The latest numbers I can see is till the 9/11 and 5 people bought the app just by browning the app store.
We will see. Since I am the only one in this space as far as I can see I think my value is justified.
Here are a few more decision points to factor in for pricing:
1. It's not about building "how hard was it to make" directly into the price. The cost to build is a fixed cost and the selling price is marginal.
2. Neither is it about building "how much value does it add"
directly into the price. An example: light bulbs provide more value than the price at which they sell.
3. What it is about, is asking how many units could I move directly if I sold it at this price versus this price versus this price. And then asking how many units could I move indirectly as a second-order consequence of having moved so many units at such and such a price. Another small example: Thomas Edison sold his light bulbs at a loss for several years in order to sell more units, scale production efficiency and ultimately recoup those years of losses in a single year of tremendous volume.
4. This hints at something people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Sam Walton all discovered: it's better to charge less if you can sell more because there are more than first-order consequences involved. The idea applies to light bulbs, cars, retail. It sparked revolution in those industries and it will spark revolution in other industries which apply it. All industries are commodities, some industries have yet to recognize it.
Practically, price should be constantly decreasing.
I would buy it at $4.99 with the mouse acceleration disable feature. Right now I use USB Overdrive but it's 32-bit and I'm not sure if it's working properly in Lion.
I have Logitech software for my MX1000 to control everything else, it just doesn't have the ability to control mouse accel.
If you start out at $15 for a couple hours (or even a day or two) then shift down to $4.99, your initial customers are going to be FUMING and will rip you apart in the reviews. This is a terrible strategy. Your launch price should be the absolutely lowest you'll ever go, and then increase it from there. You want your early adopters to feel like they got a great deal, not screwed due to price manipulation.
Several people have told me that now. Consider it part of the next update if possible
Definitely have a play with pricing, but make sure to remember that if you have three times the sales at one third of the price, all you've done is increased your support costs :)
Yes, exactly right. Your ideal strategy is raise the price to what the market will bear, then back-off a little bit, if sales start to drop off.
You should also take note of all feedback, since your customers are the people that are willing to spend a relatively high price for perceived utility.
If you are responsive to feedback, that is in itself quite a good prospect for users, and that is a lot easier at small scale, than it is if you have 1000's of users.
If you lower it to $4.99 people will tell you it's too expensive.
If you make it free, people will complain that there isn't a paid version or that it doesn't do X/Y/etc
Do not let a few people decide if you should lower your price.
If you don't sell anything, then maybe it's the price, but get some DATA first. I personally didn't think $15 was too much, but I have a PC.
IMO, $10 looks cheap, $4.99 looks trivial, $20 looks greedy, but $12/$15 seems respectable for a utility. I just paid $25 for a small graphics tool 2 days ago. If it has value, it's worth it.
Purely from irrational perspective and coming from someone living in Canada, $15.99 is indeed too much for a small and simple utility. However $4.99 is too little, almost implying there is nothing in terms of engineering effort behind the app. I would say that anything in a range of $10 to $14.99 is a better looking price.
Something else a lot of people don't realize is that mouse acceleration is turned on in OSX and it's 'impossible' to disable without an app like USB Overdrive. Mouse accel is terrible for gaming -- especially FPS. I would add this feature to your product and call it out.