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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

we could all really use a better email client, but as discussed to death in the sparrow threads, the app store has reset software pricing perceptions. People will now bitch endlessly about having to pay the princely price of $10, which theoretically comes with free perpetual upgrades. This is down from the $50-$100 people used to pay for each major version of an email client in the 90s. While this may be good for pocketbooks, it has also probably destroyed desktop mail clients for non-enterprise as a market for a software company that wants to pay landlords or mortgages in something besides appreciation.

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I don't think many people complain about the $10 price tag of these clients. Looking to replace Sparrow, I just purchased both Mail Pilot and Unibox (hadn't heard of either until this article).

The reviews of both apps don't contain complaints about price — unless the app is not working for the customer, which is a pretty reasonable complaint.

People don't complain ... they just don't buy the app. It is astounding the level of quality & support expected from low-cost apps.

I sell a $10 app on the App Store and have provided three years of free, major upgrades and dealt with many thousands of support emails. I never really felt like I was giving too much to people who paid $10.

Although I have never sold software at a higher price in the past, so I have nothing to compare with.

My impression is that the expectation for software quality and support is the same for a $1.99 iOS app and a $99 desktop app. Given that upgrades are always free in the App Store (unless you go the Omni route), the cost different is probably even more skewed, and if your popularity continues (which is hard in the app store), your support burden will grow without additional revenue from those users.

It sounds like you're an indie dev. You probably could charge more than $1.50/minute for your time ... so if you spend even five minutes supporting a customer, you're wiped out all your revenue (not even counting development time!).

>While this may be good for pocketbooks, it has also probably destroyed desktop mail clients for non-enterprise as a market for a software company that wants to pay landlords or mortgages in something besides appreciation.

Does not seem to have stopped other companies, from the Omni Group to Pixelmator. And didn't iA sold hundends of thousands of copies of it's editor when other editors where 1/5 to 1/10 the price? If it solves a need, people will pay for quality.

Not to mention that today's $10 correspond to 10 to 30 times more people using Macs than the times of $50-$100 email clients did.

People will now bitch endlessly about having to pay the princely price of $10, which theoretically comes with free perpetual upgrades.

I don't know. Some people still value quality and attention to detail. On my Android devices I'm using MailDroid pro, which is priced at around $20. And that's for a mobile app. But it's good enough for me to think that's worth it.

I'm paying $40 a year for Plex, and $180 for Spotify. I think that's good value too. I pay gladly.

Obviously there will be "cheapskates" always going for the cheapest option, but those people have always existed. Now they just have more & cheaper options and there's no way for a developer to escape that.

I guess they'll have to price that (smaller premium market) into the premium-price and hope it wont make it even smaller.

Out of curiosity, why did you decide on an annual Plex subscription over the lifetime option? Do you just doubt the viability of the lifetime option or is something else going on?

It's a case of try it properly before you pay the helluva-much-higher price.

Since then I've come around considering lifetime subscription, but now they've upped the price for it a little more. And right now I have enough other things sucking up my funds.

In a perfect illustration of human irrationality, I will probably get around to it later.

I gladly paid $49.99 for MailMate on my mac ( http://freron.com/ ) and am still extremely happy with the purchase. It's the best email client I've used for a long time and well worth it.

Perhaps the solution is to Kickstart the development of a desktop client?

Mail Pilot was actually the product of a Kickstarter, although it's been pretty thoroughly redesigned since the original concept: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-em...

Thanks! I wasn't aware of that.

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