$10

Your surfing through the App Store and come across an awesome app, and then you see the price tag, $.99.  What do you think? Way too expensive? Should it be free? or are you willing to pay the price for a great piece of software?

This is the biggest problem in the App Store.  People these days are so used to seeing a cool app and then downloading it for free and then they get used to it, not paying developer for their work.  They don’t understand that these cool little things take time and money to make, yet they still don’t pay for these utterly cool products that people devote time and money to.

Just look at appulous, “The solution to a flawed App Store.” I personally know people who will find a cool app that will cost $.99.  Only $.99 and the first thing they do after they see it on the App Store is they open appulous and pirate it for free.  Not a good ‘solution’ if you ask me.  One of my applications, Pong - iPhone Edition, had over 18,000 free downloads on appulous within a few weeks of it launching on the App Store back in May.  Now let me remind you that it is one dollar.  Really? You don’t have the money to spend one dollar on a game? Wait, how much is your iPhone or iPod touch? $200? $300? $400? If you can afford such an expensive device, something is seriously wrong if you cannot get the money to pay less than a dollar for an app and you feel that you need to get it for free, which is illegal and you can be fined up to $100,000 per piece of software.

While I could go on forever talking about different situations where pricing has had an impact on the application, but I’d like to focus on one.

Ramp Champ.  An excellent skee-ball game on the iPhone and iPod touch.  It costs $2.99 and ships with four ramps and for $.99 you can purchase two more ramps in a ramp pack (currently four ramp packs exist) Have you ever heard of a skee-ball game on the App Store? How about the number one app on the App Store right now? Skee-Ball by Freeverse. Yes, it is the same basic concept, but Ramp Champ takes it much further (I mean it) with tickets, prizes, stunning graphics and its an overall amazing game.  Yet, it has not even pierced the top 25 apps while Freeverse’s Skee-Ball has been at #1 for almost a week because Skee-Ball is $.99 while Ramp Champ is $2.99.

That really says something about the App Store.  Starting today and for the weekend, I am bumping the price of my applications up to $10.  I hope that others will join me in the cult against the free/$.99 App Store to prove that software is worth more than it is priced as on the App Store.  If you are going to make your application $10 for the weekend, be sure to link to http://cld.ly/92ccl in your app description.

Apps that are included are listed below

- ICanHasCheezburger by MC Development

- iDjembe by MC Development

- Pong - iPhone Edition by Jonah Grant

- Hot Links by Jonah Grant

- Boom by [creative]

Please email me to get your app listed here if you raised the price of it.