My hypothesis is not that people are spoiled but psychologically anchored. We buy thousands of items and for most people it’s impossible to know how much somet

My hypothesis is not that people are spoiled but psychologically anchored. We buy thousands of items and for most people it’s impossible to know how much something “should” cost. So we anchor our expectations to what we know. Web software was mostly free for years because it was either ad-supported or a speculative venture capital investment. Or a dev releasing it for free thinking that “if we get lots of users we can raise money and figure out monetization later”. The Social Network came out in 2009 and there’s a scene where Zuckerberg was made to look like a genius for rejecting monetization. People who wanted to be like Zuckerberg made stuff for free then hoped to raise money. Finally add in many developers made software for free for personal or ideological reasons. The end result is that consumers are psychologically anchored to expect that web software “should” be free, an app “should” cost $1 at most, etc It’s not really about the $10 as much as people don’t like feeling ripped off and paying $10 for something that should cost nothing makes them feel ripped off. An experience is burned into my brain when a friend who was an aspiring yoga teacher was doing a Twitch stream for 10k viewers as part of an online festival but at the last moment needed to stream to Twitch from his iPhone. There was an app that worked perfectly that cost $15 but he almost sabotaged his whole show frantically searching the App Store for a free alternative because $15 was a ripoff. He caved eventually and unhappily, then to celebrate the stream led friends and family to a sushi restaurant that was $200/person . It was never about his inability to afford $15 but his psychological feeling that a $15 app is a ripoff. But fancy sushi “should” be expensive so $200 is a fair price. We are very slowly seeing this change as interest rates rise and everyone understands software monetization better but it’s a gradual process. For whatever reason it’s often devs themselves who push back the hardest against monetization, in their warped world view someone charging $10/mo for a SaaS is deeply unethical but going to work for some FAANG company and fighting hard to maximize TC is completely fine and in fact encouraged. That way your boss worries about monetization and you are free of any moral qualms about it. FAANG devs complaining about subscriptions, privacy , and paywalls are quite common and similar to vegetarians who only eat beef and pork but avoid eating cows or pigs.