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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

So, a couple months back I released a WebGL Enabler for iOS with a pay-what-you-want model: http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/

I keep meaning to write a blog post about the results, but ~99.5% of people paid $0. Of the people who paid, probably around 50% paid the $1.99 I had as default, but what's really interesting to me is the way people priced it if they changed the value. I got a number of payments for amounts like $1.25 and $1.50, and I remember looking at those completely baffled -- who cares enough to pay anything for this (you could just download it for free -- I don't mind) but not enough to pay an extra $0.49? Really wish I had an answer there; maybe people just like 'getting a deal'?

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I'm not sure if you considered this and your payment model made that easy or even possible, but I would guess that many people would like to try it first without paying anything and after that, they would pay whatever they think it is worth for them.

I would have done this. And if there wouldn't be an easy way later on to pay/donate, I would have just leave it unpaid.

I've been toying with the idea of making a simple service like that. You can download file X for free, only by leaving your email address. Then, after a few days/weeks/months, depending on what the author wanted, the service emails you and asks you to pay for the thing you downloaded, and gives you a link to easily pay.

I've found that I'll definitely pay for things after I've tried them, but I'm more hesitant to do it before.

There's a concept in the info marketing space called the "invisible funnel"

You collect credit card info upfront, deliver the information they opted in for with their cc, then the option to not process your cc is presented.

Yeah, but that's bordering on "scam". The service I'm envisioning is more "reminds you to pay after you've used something, if you found it useful", and even the e-mail address could be useful to the creator of the thing (for further marketing).

You could even also opt to not share your e-mail address with the developer by paying directly, before accessing the thing at all.

I can imagine more people might have paid if you made the default $3.99. $1.99 is practically zero, so people may consider it less of a difference.

I also feel this way. For some reasons, I think my natural, quick feeling toward that would be that paying 1.99$ 'seems' more of an annoyance than paying 0$, and since it's not enough to be deemed worth the annoyance, I can picture myself putting 0$ instead of 1.99$.

For the same products, I feel I wouldn't change the price if it was listed at {3,4,5}.99$, I don't really know why. 1.99$ feels too close to an transaction fee, or some kind of things like that that feels like the money will be lost in The System. While paying >3.99$ seems to have more consistence, more purpose, since my intuition tells me that more of the value will end up in the proper pockets.

That's a very subjective take on this, but I support your idea that more people might have paid if the default would have been 3.99$.

Agreed. I considered having it show various different values at random to do testing on the payments received when users are presented with them, but honestly there just wasn't enough data to pull that off and make it worthwhile. I think my total sales were <40 (downloads were in the tens of thousands, IIRC).

I would be interested to see data from the Humble Bundles on pay-what-you-want pricing. They seem to have done things over the past few sales that have resulted in higher averages.

The biggest thing is that many of the products are not unlockable unless you pay over the average, so the average is always trending slightly up more than other pay-what-you-want models. High incentive to fork over a few more dollars.

Even if it increased the number of people paying the original listed price ($3.99) in this case to slightly >70% they would still gain less money than $5 and it would not have seemed as clean. In either case, I find it more interesting that so many people would pay money when they are not required.

Apparently even people "against humanity" still have a sense of justice.

I doubt the numbers people chose had any correlation to perceived value. My guess is they were just testing it to see if it would actually let them pay for a different amount. It's such a different idea, most people just aren't used to it.

I think more people would pay something instead of nothing if the default price was higher, eg if it was a $50 default those that paid $0 would be more inclined to even pay $1 because the value is percieved to be more. However, id like to see it tested.

That's what I hate most about having insight into data... the times when my intuition is wrong and there is no rational reason for what is actually happening. Human behavior can be so bizarre...

Unfortunately, it's logical thinking that is bizzarre. Irrationality is the norm.

While I'm not sure I agree, there's a fun meta discussion from Quora http://www.quora.com/Are-humans-fundamentally-rational-or-ir....

Logical thinking is fine: garbage in — garbage out.

Logical thinking won't help if you give it incorrect input data.

Unless you believe in supernatural; everything is math provided a correct model.

That is a complete misunderstanding of the word model. Models are tools to help describe expected behaviour given a plethora of assumptions - they are not there to perfectly predict what can and will happen.

The idea that a model can do so has caused innumerable problems of late and it is frustrating to hear such myths perpetuated.

To describe "what can and will happen" requires its own assumptions and therefore model.

If you can't see a model you are not digging deep enough.

Though I understand your point of view. Some think that the fundamental physics can end i.e., a unified theory of everything is possible.

It is more likely that it is turtles all the way down i.e, we can always observe phenomena that contradict predictions of current theories (reveal assumptions that are not valid for the phenomenon).

aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

I'm an Android guy myself so I might be wrong here (and your app is an example of non pirate usage for jail-breaking), but I often hear young relatives talking about jail-breaking their iPhones to save those $1-2 on apps, which to be honest, is pretty shitty behavior IMHO (yeah, I lecture them, they look at me like a crazy old person)

>aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

Careful not to fall into the trap of conflating jailbreaking with piracy. There are many, many good reasons to JB not even counting apps that end in -ous. Google voice and SMS extensions, f.lux, theming support, wifi tethering, and a great deal more low level customization than Apple gives you.

As I said, I'm an Android user primarily because it gives me much more freedom without rooting, and the few iOs devices I have (and hardly use) are not jail-broken. But people I've met who jail-break their iPhones do it mainly to pirate apps.

SBSettings alone is worth the time that it takes to jailbreak!

At least when I was a teenager, I didn't have a credit card number of my own and it would have been a PITA to negotiate my parents to let me use theirs every time I wanted something that cost just a couple of dollars (some shareware at that time I guess). So it was easier for me just to find a keygen/crack for those apps. Might something like this be in play with these jailbreaking kids?

I'm an "Android guy" and the first thing I do with my new Android devices is at least gain root (so "jailbreaking"), and sometimes install a custom ROM. I'm sure some people do it to get apps for free, but for me it is solely because there are a number of things (such as complete backups) that can't be done without rooting the device.

I'd say a lot of people see jailbreaking as a term for piracy, which is rather unfortunate. Steffen Esser mentioned releasing a jailbreak that actively defended against piracy, and the number of twitter responses to that was impressive.

I don't mind people getting it for free -- if I actually cared about making money from it, I wouldn't have gone about it the way I did -- but it's just interesting to me how people who are willing to spend money actually value it.

What I meant is, aren't you limiting yourself to an audience who already chose to go out of their way to save a couple of bucks? they may not represent "ordinary" people and how they value apps.

Sure, but it's odd that the people trying to save money on apps would pay anything at all. I don't think I have enough data or a large enough sample size to say with confidence either way.

Not that odd. Isn't the whole point of the pay-whay-you-want model that some people don't want to pay the default price?

I quite often decide against offers because I feel they are marked up 20%-200% over what I perceive them to be worth, but have occasionally bought an extra copy later on (occasionally as a gift) if I've come to feel that I got a great deal originally. Other people pay grossly over the perceived worth if they want to support the seller for one reason or another.

I wonder what would happen if you designed the page a little bit differently, and gave them an option to pay, and a separate option to download it for free.

At first glance I want to put in $0.00 just to see if it works, not necessarily because that's what I'd be willing to pay.

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