I'm not an expert like patio11 or others, but I think that it could be that developers aren't always as interested in economics as they should be and this can l

I'm not an expert like patio11 or others, but I think that it could be that developers aren't always as interested in economics as they should be and this can lead to not understanding the behaviour of markets. Technically, developers have to underprice their software to be successful. This is true for any product or service that you want to sell. Particularly for productivity focused software, the end user has to derive signficantly more in value than they pay in direct costs to the developer. In general, in my experience involved with b2b software/services, people want to being saving 20-30% of their time or money to strongly consider changing their existing habits. The reason for this is that there are also indirect costs that the end user incurs that developers don't always take into account in their cost models. End users incur costs in learning new software products, there are ongoing cognitive load costs in remembering how to use the product and there are opportunity costs in choosing your products over something else, not even necessarily in the same market. There is a cost that the user incurs in taking a risk that your software will solve their problem before they really understand its full capability. Even taking up an icon space on their phone/tablet/desktop has a cost to the user as it's a place they can't put a different app. Your app takes up harddrive space that the user has paid for and your app uses up some of their bandwidth. Finally, you aren't just competing against other software vendors in your market, you are competing against every other thing in any market the end user might want to spend their money on. End users have a limited amount of money and time and there are a huge amount of things they can spend their money on. You can't accurately measure any of these indirect costs, but you know they are there and you can estimate them. When you take into account the indirect costs suddenly there aren't as many dollars left on the table that developers aren't charging for. Another point is that the closer you price your software to its marginal utility to the end user, the more likely the end user is going to shop around looking for alternatives. You open yourself up to competition which could increase your marketing expenses. You could also suffer more churn, which is expensive to you. The point is, you want your users feeling like they are getting amazing value from your product. You don't want them feeling like your product costs just a bit less than the value they derive (which may seem like the most efficient price to you) because if that's the case your business is actually teetering over a precipice and any sudden shock could push you over the edge with many customers leaving all at once. Loyal, happy customers paying you recurring revenue buffing up your cash flow is worth more than anything.