Running Costs and Revenue Management is why: 1) SaaS has a running cost; servers, support, devops, and so on You generally have a minimum cost to run a SaaS bu

Running Costs and Revenue Management is why: 1) SaaS has a running cost; servers, support, devops, and so on You generally have a minimum cost to run a SaaS business. It's significantly less than it used to be, but it's still there. You have to run servers, unlike iPhone Apps that run on the consumers device. 2) The iPhone and Android App Stores were one of the purest environments for Revenue Management experiments we've ever witnessed. By way of my background, I worked for a while in the transport industry a few years back, and was responsible for the platforms that sold over 4 million tickets online per year. I worked with revenue management teams, so have some experience in this area. And at the time we would discuss the App Store and pricing trends. My experience does not grant me authority, these are just my observations and opinions :-) So back to Revenue Management: The market for smartphones and customers for the App Stores kept growing and the distribution model of the App Stores meant it was easy to run global experiments on pricing. App Developers quickly realised that their Revenue Management graphs showed increased Revenue and Profit when they lowered the price due to the never-before-seen size of the smartphone market. Suddenly software developers had access to millions of customers around the world who would pay 0.99c for an App. You could entice new customer with low prices, and at the time it seemed like there was a limitless supply of new customers who would pay 0.99c. So as a business you kept on generating more and more revenue. You could scale out your business to millions of customers at almost zero additional cost. As long as you didnt care about providing any support of course. Later everyone realised that Advertisers would pay more, and we ended up with trash Adware Apps.