How much are you charging for your iPad products?

If you want people to share their plans, you'll probably have to be the first to show your hand. Why would you expect someone else to if you won't.

In general terms no one has any idea. lol. It's a new market entirely. No one knows how well it will sell, etc. I expect a similar story to that of the iPhone. Everything priced higher than the market wants and then a fast decline in prices soon after. There's also many other factors. Universal apps that will work on both platforms, previous apps competing with their new version, etc.

I'm going to start a similar thread about universal apps versus separate builds.

 

The best idea I have heard is to make a universal app, which would need to have the same pricing, and then have in-app purchase of the iPad-specific content which could either be already included in the app (if size is not an issue) or downloaded from a server (to keep the iphone-only app lean).

Regarding pricing, since the iPad install base is going to be 1-5% of the iPhone/touch base for a while, and since few iPhone/touch non-trivial apps can pay for development at a price of less than $3-$5, this implies that iPad apps should be at least 20x$3 or $60 to have the same profitability as a $3 iPhone/touch app. However, with Apple's current download-count-popularity-based top-100 lists, these $60 apps will quickly drop in price to $0.99 and the iPad app store will quickly become a bunch of trivial apps like those we already see on the App Store today.

It's hard for me to believe that the smart folks at Apple haven't already foreseen this, and so I would expect that we will have a different type of App Store to avoid this problem with the iPad store opens. Of course, I could just be engaging in wishful thinking, because the iPhone/touch app store suffers the same problem of non-sustainability and nothing has been done about it yet.

 

Given that the two markets are really the same market, I'd expect the crash-to-the-floor pricing we've already seen continue here. In fact, I don't expect it to get off the floor at all.

My only hope that this changes is that if Apple wants to court serious apps to this new platform, they'll have to fix the price problem first. No serious productivity app that currently sells for $249 or more is going to port to the iPad and sell at $2.99 instead. While I don't have high hopes for this, being able to do actual useful stuff on the iPad that I cannot do on my phone is the thing that would make me (and many others) buy an iPad. As of now, I'd much prefer the netbook/iPhone combo.

 

I am making an iPad version of Empty City 3D and I plan on charging $1.99.

 

Price

I am not a Dev myself, but as a consumer a thought I could pitch in. (Feel free to disregard).

To me it depends on the app. Productivity apps I'd be willing to pay 2.5x - 3x the price for an iPad-optimized app. A game, maybe 1.5x.

Also important is differentiating your iPad app from the iPhone version noticably - remember, we can run your iPhone versions directly as well.

Whatever happens, I think the best route is probably having one version, as M of IMAK suggests. This has the benefit of prevents angry consumers from pounding down your door because now they have to re-buy your app. A possible method of implementing this (if it's possible) is to have an in app purchase option to download iPad content. That way you can charge more for the iPad version than the iPhone version.

 

I don't see what Apple needs to "fix". There are plenty of premium apps that do well on the app store (OmniFocus, Tomtom, etc…)

I am adamant that Apple has done nothing wrong with pricing on the App store. All they do is allow you to set at any price from 0.99 to 999. If anyone's caused a pricing problem on the app store it's developers themselves — If you want to complain that the App store prices are too low, then stop pricing your apps at $0.99 or $1.99…

 

It's because of how the top lists work -- they favor low prices. Visibility is everything.

 

Since we have raised the price of some of our apps above $1.99, can I complain now

I am curious if you would feel the same way if Apple allowed pricing down to $0.09 and continued to have "paid" top-100 category lists based solely on average daily downloads? What about if the lowest price was $0.01?

My feelings on this subject were summed up by Craig Hockenberry in his letter to Steve Jobs. After developing iPhone apps for almost 2 years and having both successes and failures, I would say that as long as you still display most of your premium apps on a bargain table in the back "bottom 150,000" room, then it's not going to be profitable for developers to create premium apps. A much more profitable route for developers is to crank out as many generic me-too apps as possible and hope that the laws of probability swing their way and they can get an app onto the bargain table in the front "top-3000" room.

So, while developers "could" raise the prices of their apps to over $2, there is no incentive to do so. Instead, there is a much greater incentive to develop 100 $1 apps in the same amount of time.

Just do a search on google with time:future and you can find all of this explained, along with this fine quote:
"And that, my young Padawan, is how the app store grew to one million apps."

 

My babysitter has an iPhone and balks at $0.99 apps as being 'too expensive'. Never mind she's holding onto a multi-hundred dollar device that costs a minimum of $70++ per month to operate.

I have an idea I'm building for the iPad and will start at $3.99 and see what happens. I have no lofty goals, but I do hope I get a few sales.

 

i cant see why Apple hasn't fixed the pricing problem yet. it could easily been solved with a price filter, allowing user to list games within a certain price range($0.99+, $1.99+, $2.99 ect. )

okay it probably wont get rid of the problem for good, but it sure will encourage developers to invest more time to create more valuable apps

 

That is a bad idea on many levels.

1. Imagine this. An iPad user browses for an iPad game in the iPad section of the app store. They see your app and buy it. They will expect it to be a fully functional iPad app (and if it's a universal app they will also expect it to work on the iPhone). They launch your app and it just looks like a scaled up iPhone app. Then the game demands EVEN MORE money via in app purchase to get the full iPad experience (that they were expecting in the first place!). You are going to have a whole lot of angry customers. They will feel they got misled and ripped off.

2. Most Indie developers don't have the money to run servers to provide downloadable content, so most likely the apps they make will include locked content and In App Purchases will just unlock that content. People who want to buy your universal app will now be forced to download a giant app that has all sorts of high resolution images and content that they will never see.

3. In app purchases do NOT count toward your rank in iTunes. Anyone trying to get noticed on the app store knows that you need a high ranking to maintain good exposure (at least be in the top 100 of some category). In the early days of iPad apps you can bet the majority of available titles will be modified games/apps that already exist, but got a facelift to support the higher resolution of the iPad. These games were not designed from the ground up with the iPad in mind. I'm sure in the future this will change (depending on the success of the iPad). But for now, that means that if you take your existing game and update it to include iPad graphics and functionality you are putting in a whole lot of work (and probably spending money on new art etc) hoping to get noticed during the "new goldrush". Your app already exists, so updating it won't get it noticed on the "what's new" filter (Apple stopped making updates show up in that list recently). And even if all your existing customers buy an iPad (not likely) and decide to buy your in app purchase, your rank won't go up at all. You are basically limiting your iPad sales to a small subset of your existing customers... just the ones who happen to get an iPad... and of those only the ones who want to pay extra for nicer graphics. This will not help you get new customers... at all.

4. iPad games will likely cost more to produce due to the demand for higher quality graphics (2D games especially). The cost for making a game from scratch supporting both iPhone and iPad will be higher than making an app for just one. Having a universal app forces you to have one price for the iPhone and iPad versions, even though the cost to develop for iPad will be higher. Lumping them together is a terrible deal for the developer.

Basically, the universal app with iPad functionality locked behind DLC screws the developer and pisses off the customer. Don't do it.

 

In my own opinion, since the iPad market will "technically" be in its infancy, pricing an app will be a matter of trial and error. Start with a "safe" price and then feel free to tweak it higher or lower based on the response. As more apps come out in the succeeding months, you'll notice that prices will start to stabilize. I just hope that consumers don't settle for $0.99 a pop this time. Developers deserve more for their hard work.

 

Unless Apple changes their ranking algorithm, expect to see the exact same pricing trends. Once an app is developed, it becomes a sunk cost. The developers that slip out of the top lists will cut prices or even go free for a day in desperate measures to regain visibility. They will have nothing to lose. If top lists were based on revenue, there would be no incentive for this sort of thing. I personally wouldn't mind if people looking for free or cheap stuff had to go to a bit of extra effort. Leave the bargain hunting to sites like AppShopper.

 

you, as the developer, set the price of the applications.

if you want to charge $0.99 and devalue yourself - do it. if you want to make a business out of it; then that wont be your price point. i saw a great panel discussion at techcrunch mobile at MWC 2010 and they had an excellent point - selling applications isn't a business model - services and added value are.

think about it.

 

Let's just hope that prices don't end up at... (dramatic pause)

ONE
HUNDRED
BILLION
NANOPENNIES!

That would be far too little.

I previously suggested the following pricing tiers:

Code:

Indie Games ---------- $2.99 
Small Studio Games --- $4.99 
AAA Titles ----------- $9.99 

The definitions I used caused some controversy though, so I'll try and clarify. The first tier is for simple pick-up-and-play games. This is the territory of stuff like Doodle Jump, Prarie Dog Parachute, Textopolis, etc. i.e. Stuff that's focused and limited in content.

The third tier is for blockbuster games. i.e. The Blades of Fury or Nova of the iPad. This tier is fairly self-explanatory.

The second tier is for the in-between stuff that provides solid content but doesn't quite reach the level of blockbuster. This is your Defender Chronicles, Spybots, Blimp, Soosiz, etc.

My feeling is that these tiers would provide solid guidelines for developers about what they should charge. They're not so low as to cheat developers out of their profits, but not so high as to discourage users from purchasing apps. Plus, these are only guidelines. Developers are free to move up and down the scale. My only recommendation is that initial prices be at or higher than the selected tier. $2.99 should be the lowest long-term price of any iPad app short of making it free.

Thoughts?