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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

I am also checking much less frequently now. But it is still zero :) https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/09/27/you-have-0-ins...

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Do you have any way to tell if any free users actually entered their AWS keys into your app? There is a much higher level of trust needed for your app over the average mobile app. To actually use it with production data when I'd never heard of you before, I'd probably generate a honey pot set of keys and check if they leaked, and other tests before I could trust it with real keys. Security apps are really tricky to bootstrap.

The keys are staying on the device, so I have no way to check if people actually entered them. I'm also not running any analytics.

I mean, I just guess that if people weren't using the app, they would uninstall it eventually? I've had a retention rate of 60% which I thought was pretty good and made the think that people actually use the app.

That being said, I completely understand the trust issue you mention. It's even worse for the online version of the same service, iamproxy.com

Do you have a suggestion how I can improve the trust?

Have you considered increasing the price?

I'm serious. I'm not a mobile app publisher, I don't know anything about app discovery through the Play store, but I have experienced the paradox of increasing sales by increasing prices in other channels.

I'm not super up on the psychology at play, but I've read it's because people use price as a proxy for quality/utility in uncertain markets.

I think that the price is pretty high already for app store standards :)

And honestly, if you look at the app, a higher price would feel like a ripoff.

Well it might be worth a try - you at least don’t have to worry about killing your sales :)

Touché... :D

Economically, if you deliver value, you deliver value. Does not matter the price, if it's worth doing and generates profit for me.

I know.

But what value would you assign to "being able to check Kibana on AWS from the phone"?

Here's my metric: I do complicated merges once in a while. If Beyond Compare (price = 60$) helps me resolve the conflicts in few minutes, of what used to take an hour of cursing and sweating, I pay them and consider the money well spent, because I can spend that hour (and a lot of others) that the tool freed up for me, earning money. The tool pays for itself basically.

If it's a niche market, low prices is rarely a viable approach because you won't have a lot of volume. Also, all the info you have about app stores and revenue are based on the total mass, or on the top-100 lists, and niche apps fall completely outside of it. There are actually a few narrow categories where you can get away with a high price.

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