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Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for

Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up. Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100. (All priced CAD, rounded.)
- dvdkon 7y ago
  It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly. On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really badly (e.g. DOOM Eternal). Console game pricing always seemed way too high to me, I'd spend what I saved on not building a PC in just a few AAA titles.
  - c22 7y ago
    For an even more extreme perspective, I haven't paid for software of any sort in over 20 years, and I don't pirate either. I don't play games and if I want to edit a photo I figure out how to do it in gimp. I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software. If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).
mortenjorck 7y ago
This is, of course, completely unsustainable. Savage Interactive has only been able to sustain this particular price point because it's presumably closely correlated to new iPad purchases. It's the most high-profile iPad visual art app, perennially promoted on the App Store, and so you can model it more or less as a tiny percentage of quarterly iPad revenue. That is a market position, in its vertical, with space for approximately one. I don't have a solution for this problem. There has to be something in between a one-time $10 purchase and a $120 annual subscription, but Apple hasn't shown any interest in finding it.
- cageface 7y ago
  Paid upgrades have worked well for other platforms but Apple stubbornly refuses to support this, instead trying to drive users into subscriptions they don't want. I think it's too late now. Apple has taught an entire generation of users that mobile software is not worth paying real money for and effectively killed the ecosystem of apps they need to promote the iPad as a general purpose computing device.
  - edude03 7y ago
    Well, not apple to be fair. Developers are free to set their prices to whatever; it just so happens some developers set their prices to $0.99 and set that as the expectation
    - cageface 7y ago
      It's a race to the bottom. There's always somebody willing to go lower and the app store doesn't give you much room to stand out. Before I quit I had users complaining my app was overpriced at $1.
  - keybits 7y ago
    Agenda notes app has elegantly solved this. Pay once and permanently unlock all current features. If a new release has a feature you want, you can purchase again. It's more work for the developer but they did a great write up on how they built this capability: https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agenda-138a11995595 https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agend...

Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.

frosted-flakes 7y ago

When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up. Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100. (All priced CAD, rounded.)

dvdkon 7y ago
It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly. On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really badly (e.g. DOOM Eternal). Console game pricing always seemed way too high to me, I'd spend what I saved on not building a PC in just a few AAA titles.
- c22 7y ago
  For an even more extreme perspective, I haven't paid for software of any sort in over 20 years, and I don't pirate either. I don't play games and if I want to edit a photo I figure out how to do it in gimp. I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software. If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).

mortenjorck 7y ago

This is, of course, completely unsustainable. Savage Interactive has only been able to sustain this particular price point because it's presumably closely correlated to new iPad purchases. It's the most high-profile iPad visual art app, perennially promoted on the App Store, and so you can model it more or less as a tiny percentage of quarterly iPad revenue. That is a market position, in its vertical, with space for approximately one. I don't have a solution for this problem. There has to be something in between a one-time $10 purchase and a $120 annual subscription, but Apple hasn't shown any interest in finding it.

cageface 7y ago
Paid upgrades have worked well for other platforms but Apple stubbornly refuses to support this, instead trying to drive users into subscriptions they don't want. I think it's too late now. Apple has taught an entire generation of users that mobile software is not worth paying real money for and effectively killed the ecosystem of apps they need to promote the iPad as a general purpose computing device.
- edude03 7y ago
  Well, not apple to be fair. Developers are free to set their prices to whatever; it just so happens some developers set their prices to $0.99 and set that as the expectation
  - cageface 7y ago
    It's a race to the bottom. There's always somebody willing to go lower and the app store doesn't give you much room to stand out. Before I quit I had users complaining my app was overpriced at $1.
- keybits 7y ago
  Agenda notes app has elegantly solved this. Pay once and permanently unlock all current features. If a new release has a feature you want, you can purchase again. It's more work for the developer but they did a great write up on how they built this capability: https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agenda-138a11995595 https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agend...