TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Ben Brooks:

So what bugs the crap out of me is that developers are whining about not making enough money, when they are the ones in charge of the pricing. If you need more money per customer to hack it, charge more. If people aren’t willing to pay that, well, unfortunately you have your answer.

People will pay for good software, the Omnigroup proves this point, but you have to offer compelling and unique software in order to demand such prices. I am not saying that App Cubby thinks it is the consumers fault, but it sure sounds like that to me — and that bugs me. I don’t like when people charge too little to make a living and then complain about charging too little.

Good thoughts, but it’s worth considering that his example of a company’s that been successful selling good software at relatively high prices, Omni Group, isn’t solely dependent on iOS sales. Omni Group sells a number of Mac applications and has for years, and while they have moved to the Mac App Store, they also may have a significant amount of upgrade revenue as a result, something iOS developers (without implementing an In App Purchase system) don’t have access to.

I want to be clear that I have no idea what Omni Group’s revenue breakdown is like. It’s possible that sales from their website and upgrade revenue from it is now an insubstantial part of their overall revenue, which would support Ben’s contention. But it’s also quite possible that it is a significant portion.

I don’t want to distract from Ben’s point, which is that we (developers) need to price their applications at a level which will provide enough revenue to survive.1 But it should be pointed out, because having access to upgrade revenue would make selling applications for a one-time price much more viable.

1. It’s worth pointing out, too, that this is difficult to do when developers have virtually no data for how people are finding their applications on the App Store, what the conversion rate is, et cetera. This is all a guessing game, and it’s a guessing game whose outcome determines the success of our applications. As a result, there’s a dominant tendency to price applications at the typical rate for the market. [↩]