Making Money on Apps

19 Aug 2014 • volleythat.com

This is kind of a bummer. But it also quickly answers the classic question, “why won’t people pay as much for my app as a cup of coffee?” Every additional cup of coffee costs Starbucks something to make, so, intuitively, it costs money to buy a cup of coffee. It doesn’t cost Facebook anything to deliver another copy of the Facebook app to your iPhone, so it makes sense that it’s free. There’s a longer answer, but that’s the basic difference between $0 and not-$0.

Sounds logical to me.

IN OTHER WORDS: People pay for physical stuff because physical stuff seems like it should cost something. Pixels on a screen do not seem like they should cost something. This basic human intuition is very very very hard to break. Keep that in mind!

But didn’t people pay for software for a decade or two before the recent app store economy drove prices down to $0?