I suppose it depends whether you see this as your sole income stream.
One of the nice things about writing shareware is that you don't
expect to make a living out of it. The price you get for your
software is the price people will pay, not the cost of creating it.
For one thing, no-one knows or cares how much work it was for you to
write the software. For another, there is (often rightly) an
assumption that you are writing the software out of the pleasure of
creating something new. When I wrote Key Minder [1] I was writing it
for me, for fun, for education and so on, and how much I would get
for it was the least of my concerns. Another consideration is the
competition - I think you can price above your competitors, provided
that you have a usp that is of value to your customers, but if your
product doesn't offer anything better you can only compete on price.
Surely the key thing with a killer app is to exploit the internet
effect - write something everyone needs, price it so that no-one can
resist it and rely on selling that one inexpensive item millions of
times.
Mind you, I haven't quite reached a million sales of Key Minder so
who am I to talk :-)
Ian.
--
Dr Ian M Piper
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
skype: ianmpiper
--
[1] This was not intended as an advert, but if you would like to see
Key Minder you can get it here: http://www.tellura.co.uk/keyminder/
(written with REALbasic 5.5.2)
On 16 Feb 2006, at 3:29 am, Dr Gerard Hammond wrote:
Hi,
Sometimes I see software being sold for $2, $5, $7 dollars and I
shake my head in disbelief.
If the person who wrote this software only thinks it's worth $7
I'll often think it is junk and consider writing it myself and have
the source code. How could you offer support on a $7 product.
Plus to raise a requisition or use my VISA just seems more trouble
than it's worth. When I shop I want to buy something of value, say
$50.
Next time you are thinking about releasing a product, please
calculate and factor in the real cost of having to write _and_
provide support for it.
OK lets say, you want to earn $100,000 USD per year, with 4 weeks
holiday, 5 days per week, working for about 8 hours per day. Not
unreasonable. You get a life, some money and can have a non-email
group family.
This is 1920 hours per year that you can work on your REALbasic
project.
With these figures, it works out that you need to charge yourself
out at $52/hour.
Now look at your $7 killer app and ask yourself are you really
going to sell 8 copies for every hour that you took to write it.
Or another way, did it only take you 8 minutes to write?
I think not. So price it properly and if you do sell a million
copies you'll be über rich.....
--
Cheers,
Dr Gerard Hammond
Bioinformatic Analyst
Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, Australia.
All computers wait at the same speed.
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