Apple products might be cheaper compared to 90s but they still incorporate a significant margin. An $800 iPhone can end up having a margin of about $300-400. Ev

Apple products might be cheaper compared to 90s but they still incorporate a significant margin. An $800 iPhone can end up having a margin of about $300-400. Even if you incorporate other stuff R&D, marketing etc, you still have $200+ margin on the phone. Compared to that, consumer software has become priced around 5-10 USD. At $5 and 1000 customers, you get $5k in revenue. After Apple/Google's commission, you get $3500. Factor in other stuff for marketing, customer support etc. you barely are left with profit. At 200 hours of work, that is $17.5 per hour. And getting to even the first 1000 users can take a long long time. Another option is to make it free, supported by ads, but then you have to have a much bigger user base or you'll be making pennies. On top of that, people get angry when you charge for upgrade or subscriptions. Checkout twitter threads for Reeder 4 and Tweetbot 4. Plenty of people complained - "why do we have to pay again" Consumer software is currently a terrible space profit/revenue wise. B2B is a much better space to operate in. I'm currently building a pocket/instapaper alternative but all my investigation around revenue/pricing/profitability left me with much less optimism than I expected. I'll complete this project but I'm probably not going to get into B2C again.