4 ms·
Another $1K App on the App Store
- fnayr 14y agoThat's fine. If they lower their price quickly back to $.99 Apple can ban them (and has stated they will ban developers engaging in blatant price manipulations). If they don't, no one will buy it, and if some poor schmuck does he will get a refund on an accidental purchase.
- nayefc 14y agoLooking at previous pricing points though, it seems they changed their prices rapidly up and down. Isn't this blatant price manipulation? They're not banned yet.
- fnayr 14y agoYeah sometimes Apple doesn't catch them all. But they have banned developers in the past for this. If someone reports them, they have a high chance of getting banned.
- spinlock 14y agoWhy would apple want to ban people from dropping the price of an app from $999 to $0.99? Are they just trying to make sure that people who buy at high prices don't feel bad about their purchases?
- josephagoss 14y agoI guess its because moving the price up and down a lot is a way to get people to buy it for cheap and review it, and then rise the price to catch people off guard. Apple might see giant price changes as a attempt to trick and fool people. Instead of allowing it, a outright ban is a much better idea. EDIT: see the activity here. http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2 http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2 . When its cheap they hook people in and get reviews on sites. then they rise it around the place trying to trap people. Instead of Apple giving these people the chance to correct course and set a fair price, they just ban which is far better. Never give scum a second chance, they always try to find a way.
- blhack 14y agoBecause raising it to $999 temporarily is just a cheap, and obnoxious, way of getting free marketing. It's trying to game the app store.
- wahnfrieden 14y agoWhy would you want your customers to feel cheated? It also leads to more refund requests, which have a processing overhead.
- gdilla 14y agoRight, and Apple debits your account for the purchase price (not the net 70% amount) when a user demands a refund. So a lot of this and you can actually run negative.
- S4M 14y agoThat's weird, if I wanted to manipulate the price to make it look like my $0.99 are a bargain, I wouldn't set the initial price at $999, as it will become obvious, but at something like $5.
- andrewroycarter 14y agoI wanted to say this must be an April Fool's thing, but looking at the past price points http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2 http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2
- bkanber 14y agoI don't understand -- why would they do this? Trying to trick someone into dropping $1k on their app? Or is there some way you can game the app store by messing with prices?
- cantbecool 14y agoFree marketing.
- fnayr 14y agoThey do it so that when they lower the price to $.99 3 days later, the robots pick up on the 10000% lower price.
- Bill_Dimm 14y agoIt would only be 99.9% lower.
- randomdata 14y agoMaybe people really do want to buy the app for $1K? There is no way to know until you test the market.
- c3vin 14y agomoney laundering
- ydvj 14y agoif you 'accidentally' make a purchase, perhaps they try to snare the kids playing with the ipad lying around.. the money certainly disappears faster than it'll ever come back..
- ultimoo 14y agoThis is the reason I buy $15 Apple 'gift' cards from my local Target instead of using my primary CC on the iTunes store.
- coderholic 14y agoMy guess is that is to manipulate all of the app discount sites that scan the app store and report on apps that have recently been discounted. If the developers drop the app to $0.99 then all of those sites will report this as a huge saving, and possibly feature it more prominently as a result (I'm assuming those sites are all automated - and there are a lot of them!)
- LinaLauneBaer 14y agoI am the developer of one of those "discount sites". Well I do not have a site but apps for iOS and OS X that show you the discounts. I filter those things out on the server side in extreme cases and my Mac app allows you to specify your own filter criteria like in iTunes where you can have smart playlists. So for example you could ignore apps where the old price is $999 and the new price is $0.99 or something like that. http://store-news-app.com/ http://store-news-app.com/
- igorgue 14y agoWhen price changes from say free to 1K and people have to update do you have to pay for the update?
- fnayr 14y agoNo
- chrisjack 14y agoIt seem to be a good way to have free marketing. They will probably drop it back tomorow to free or 0.99$
- ja27 14y agoIf you have an AppAnnie account you can see the grossing ranks. Looks like someone in India bought a copy. It's the #6 best-grossing iPhone/iPod app in India right now. It also peaked at #21 in Malaysia on the 29th. So it looks like 2 sales at that price. http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/519800737/ranking/#view=grossing-ranks&date=2013-04-01 http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/519800737/ranking/#view=gros...
- kushsolitary 14y agoYes, that's where I saw it.
- TylerE 14y agoAlmost makes me wonder if they're trying to trick people - e.g. this just see a price starting with 99 and assume 99 cents How does Apple handle things like this? Does it immediately auth the CC for purchases over a certain amount?
- kajham 14y agoTo this point, I could see it as a shrewd marketing strategy where they buy the app with different iTunes, get back 70% of the price, and get themselves into the top grossing apps for a bit. Wonder if that helps with visibility?
- c3vin 14y agothis seems like a brilliant online ordering system for heroin
- ck2 14y agoAre there legit apps over $100 ?
- cncool 14y agoProloquo2Go
- callmeed 14y agoI recall one that helped you study for the bar exam and was really expensive. I assumed it was legitimate.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoThis one I think: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/barmax-ca/id345722008?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/barmax-ca/id345722008?mt=8 Called BarMax. They even call it "cheaper" on their official web-site. Which just raises the question: cheaper than /what/?
- PanMan 14y agoCheaper than the books it replaces, which I heard cost thousands of dollars.
- mikecarlucci 14y ago$999 is cheap for a bar review. Prices do vary from state to state, but BarMax, Barbri, and Kaplan all offer programs for the CA bar. Barbri for California: $4,135 http://www.barbri.com/courseInfo/barReviewCourse/pricing.html http://www.barbri.com/courseInfo/barReviewCourse/pricing.htm... Kaplan for California $2,190 http://www.kaptest.com/Bar-Exam/Bar-Review-Courses/General-Bar-Review/complete-california-bar-review-course.html http://www.kaptest.com/Bar-Exam/Bar-Review-Courses/General-B...
- balbaugh 14y agoCheaper than other forms of Bar Exam prep like BarBri or Kaplan which run in the thousands.
- 14y ago
- mattyohe 14y agoYou can see the erratic pricing activity here: http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2 http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2
- gurvinder 14y agoIts usually done to trick the top grossing apps rankings. Developer will raise the price to $1k then buy himself some copies using different fake accounts, thus raising the ranking. Once ranking is achieved, they will reduce the price in hope to get more sales.
- nchuhoai 14y agoI'm no expert in App Store rankings but isn't that quite expensive way of doing so? Assuming you pay it 10 times, you end up with burning 3000 dollars in Apple transaction cuts. And I doubt 10 sales, will get you into top-grossing
- fmavituna 14y agoWhat's the cut of Apple in that kind of purchase and how many do they need to buy to get in to that ranking? If it's 30% and 20, it's still quite a bit money.
- weakwire 14y agofree marketing? I'll take it!
- creeo 14y agoI'm one of the developers of this app and I can say that you shouldn't expect a price drop on this app soon. It's been 100$ for several months and now it's 1000$. It's not a special type of promotion, not a way to trick app review sites, it's just 999$ for an app and that's it. Some people can afford buying an app for 1k$ and you know what? We are not one of them so we just can't afford buying our own app for promotion purposes :) Those people who don't like our app are always able to receive their money back. Some do, but some don't and it helps us continue the development of our new project. You can continue discussing "how scum we are" but the truth is no one is trying to fool anybody. It's absolutely legal to sell an app for 999$, and those who bought it for 99$ or 999$ don't write reviews that spill dirt on us or our game, they just play it and make some effort to entertain themselves, and those who got it for free very often are too lazy to read 5 words in the training mode just to understand how to play. I'm done.
- syncerr 14y agoThis must be trolling. > Those people who don't like our app are always able to receive their money back. Can you explain the refund process?
- creeo 14y agoI'm not sure about the customer loses but when he requests a refund, we don't receive a cent of it. For us it's 100% money back. People do that quite often. And it's not trolling.
- RougeFemme 14y agoI ignored this initially, thinking it had be an April Fools' joke. Then I saw the comments piling up and thought I should check it out. I will continue to treat it as an April Fools' joke.