I found the comment fascinating "People will spend hours researching a $2 purchase, browsing reviews, emailing the developer, checking online forums. Then they will go to a coffee shop they’ve never been before and buy a $4 coffee."
It is so true, and so weird at the same time. Why the investment in research time for the app and the disdain for the coffee which will pass through your system roughly 45 minutes later? Makes me wonder if they should charge $19.99 for the app and offer a 'trial version' for $4.99 which lets you see if you want to buy it with no expiration date.
I'm not sure many people really spend hours researching a $2 app purchase, but I think the reason you spend more time doing that than buying coffee is quite simple.
With Coffee you know what you are getting and know that at a minimum it will supply enough caffeine to give you a mid-morning perk. Almost all coffee shops provide coffee that is consistently good enough that it won't taste disgusting so the process is an evolutionary one, if you find a better coffee shop that is only slightly further away you will just go there from that point on.
The problem with buying apps, especially on mobile stores is that I've bought several (even well rated ones) that either do not work at all on my device or are close to useless for my purposes.
Since many apps don't offer trials and the android store return policy doesn't give you enough time often to make an informed decision of whether or not to keep an app you do have to do your homework or you risk throwing $2 away.
$2 isn't allot of money but it is for something which is 0 use to me, a $4 coffee even if it's not the most delicious will at minimum provide a caffeine fix. I can think of a few occasions on the android market where I have spent $10-15 just buying a variety of $2-5 apps that supposedly do the same job in order to find one that I actually want to use. I can reduce this cost significantly by doing some research although an hour would seem excessive in most occasions 15-20 minutes may be reasonable.
Right, coffee is a (mostly fungible) commodity product that requires an investment of ~3-5 minutes of drinking time and you're done.
There's basically no opportunity cost to picking the "wrong" coffee. It won't take you longer to drink, will probably give you the same amount of caffeine and just won't taste quite as good as the "right" one.
Apps can require a significant time investment to learn/use them. There's also a potentially large opportunity cost to picking the wrong app. App store searching kind of blows, without some invested time, you can't even know which one is the "right" app for you to spend some time on. Though I also agree that 15-20 minutes is much more likely than hours of research.
The $2 isn't the point, it's the cost after the purchase that you're spending time to make sure it isn't wasted.
I agree with the fact that it's not really about the $2 or even how many competitors there are -- it just happens to be that the apps are currently priced about the same as a coffee.
My hypothesis is that the bigger question is really one of expectation -- whether the app accomplishes exactly what the user expects it to do (not what the app markets itself to do). The more complex the expected result (ie. coffee -> coffee hit, fart app -> laughs, conversion calculator -> converts stuff, your nifty social app -> ?) the more doubt people have in just throwing down money (regardless of how "small" the amount).
I suspect it boils down to two things: the number of ways in which things can compete and the perceived level of normal consumption.
Starting with the latter: people who drink coffee mostly see it as near-daily consumption. If they're thinking about it at all, they're not thinking about "will I have coffee", but rather "which coffee to have". On the other hand, many software buyers have "don't buy anything" as a very real possibility in their minds. If I "have to buy it anyway", the difference between $2 and $4 per day doesn't seem important because people are surprisingly bad at multiplying by 365.
Coffee also presents a much less complex competitive landscape than software (which is not to say it is less competitive; I strongly suspect the reverse is true). As far as I can tell coffee shops can compete on price, location, ambience, brand, and flavor. My guess is that, above a fairly low bar for flavor, location is the dominant competitive attribute. "Am I going to walk an extra block to save $1?" Again, people don't know how to multiply by 365. I suspect coffee shops strategize thusly: "I'll get whatever customer base is closer to me than to competitors, and fighting on price is pointless. I might get some marginal purchases by improving branding and ambience, thus persuading people to stay longer and buy more." So everyone pays $4 at the nearest half-decent coffee shop and all is peaceful in the universe.
Software, on the other hand, is an incredibly complex offering and I think that complexity leads to a perception that diligent consumer research will be rewarded with enhanced satisfaction or reduced expenditure. The problem here is that the reduced expenditure is easy to quantify and guaranteed prior to purchase, whereas the enhanced satisfaction is poorly quantified and feels uncertain unless you're dealing with a market-leading strongly-branded product like Angry Birds. So, unless your'e buying Angry Birds, you'll spend some time looking to see what other apps are cheaper with "the same" features.
Hm. I feel like even after three rounds of editing I've achieved a very low insight-to-sentences ratio. Sorry :-)
A paid app might or might not deliver the functionality, and if it doesn't, after one $1.99 app purchase you need to buy another app, and the first one is a realized loss. Psychologically we don't react well to realized losses.
I wonder if, psychologically, it's because the game is perceived as something you will permanently own, while the coffee is temporary. People seem to weigh the first kind of decision much more heavily.
I'll throw out a random personal theory here. I think this is because buying apps is a solitary activity.
As humans we are more comfortable fitting in or following. When you go to a coffee shop or a crowded store, you're buying something because you actually see others buying it. The decision-making aspect is "taken away" from you, as it was already done by people at large. There is also the element of human interaction with the barista. It's much easier to spend $4 this way.
Yes, at the coffee shop you also might have an immediate purpose -- like chat with a friend. But even when I am alone, spending $4 doesn't seem like a big investment. It feels and seems normal. And note that this doesn't have to do with the quality of the product.
In the meantime, when you're at alone and are browsing an app store, the burden of decision making is on you. In essence, the thought process is "am I making a good decision? is it normal to buy something like this? do I really need this?" With that, $1 can seem like quite a bit when you have time and solitude to decide.
I think there is a lot more to this, and I think you're onto something.
Buying coffee is not only a social activity, it's something that's seen as a sociable thing to do.
Buying apps is indeed a solitary activity, and - despite the burgenoing marketplace - is still something slightly outside of the mainstream.
I suspect there is trust issues here - the average app isn't well trusted as opposed to the average cup of coffee - as well as exchanging money for a virtual thing as opposed to a physical.
edit : thinking further about this - the top n listings are just like the coffee queue. It's self reinforcing because you see other people are buying the app, which overcomes some of the trust issues. We all think - well, all these other people bought it, must be something OK about it.
The problem this brings about is the self-reinforcing top of the market which becomes harder for others to break into.
I would go even further to say that all consumer purchases are made to enable social interaction, even when transacted in solitude.
The apps that have been successful on a grand scale are typically ones you want to immediately show off to your friends. You are not buying entertainment or utility, you are buying a conversation starter. That is where the value lies.
I'd take it a step further. People don't weigh the coffee-purchasing decision at all. That's the key difference. Coffee buying has become a routine, whereas app buying is consciously considered. The process of considering and purchasing an app is -- at least for most people -- not a daily, habitual, automatic one. And so it is with most purchases in life. Anything we're not doing on a super-regular basis does not become automated and relegated to subconscious action to the extent that a daily routine does.
That's not to say that buying an app can't become a daily routine, of course. Anything is possible. But it seems unlikely for most people.
If right next to the $4.00 coffee there was a large selection of free but low quality caffeinated beverages, I'm pretty sure some folks would spend a lot more time before deciding to buy. And the chemical addiction thing probably short circuits some faculties of reason.
I find I do this all the time. For instance, if I'm out of town for the day, I'd think nothing of spending $10 at Wendy's for lunch. But somehow spending $8 for an MP3 album I've wanted badly for months is an extravagance.
For me, part of the problem is family budgeting. As long as I only do it a few times a month, I won't have to justify $10 for lunch to my wife. Even though going with a $2 lunch and buying the $8 album would be spending the same amount of money, in practice I'd still be trying to justify the album purchase.
Clearly that sucks. But there's a pretty good reason for it. If we weren't budgeting, my wife and I would probably buy 20-30 albums a month, and that we cannot afford. So clamping limits on albums makes very good sense. But it definitely feels like it leads to non-optimal use of money overall -- we're keeping to a budget, but perhaps not spending the money as well as we could.
More to do with marketing? I've told my boys all their lives "If they have to put it on a TV ad, its probably crap. Good stuff we all know about through our friends."
Got to ask - you don't budget Wendy's? (Hardees is a better choice anyway:)
I believe my wife budgets both restaurants and fast food. I suppose that means at a fundamental level, the problem is shifting budgeting from one line item to another is a PITA.
I don't think it's anything to do with marketing. I just grabbed Wendy's as an example, but I also recently ended up at a relatively fancy restaurant I'd never heard of before walking in their front door, and I spent more on a single glass of wine there than that album would have cost. On some level, I think it comes down to feeling like food is a necessity and buying more music is not. But at the same time, if you'd offered me the choice ("Don't buy the wine and you can buy the album") I'd have taken the album for sure.
That is so true! If I consciously do the A/B comparison, I'd make entirely different choices. But I'm faced with one choice at a time. So the dilemma never materializes.
I actually use this to the opposite effect to convince myself whether an app is worth the cost. I think of it as "for the price of half a latte, I get to own and enjoy an app for the next N years". Seems like a great deal to me. If all I have to do is buy some developer the equivalent of half a latte for a productivity app I'll enjoy daily, I think I'm actually getting a steal.
BTW - I did buy Shift Jelly's PocketCasts app from the Android Market for something like $2.99. I highly recommend it, the app has un-tethered me from iTunes podcast syncing. Now I just download/stream exactly the episodes I want to listen to.
The app has some rough UX edges regarding behaviors of the back button, etc, but I'm going to write the developers about that.
But people do this all the time in other parts of their life as well.
They'll drive all over town just to save $20 off their grocery bill by using coupons.
But many won't spend 15 minutes haggling over the purchase of a car where you could gain thousands just by doing some research and getting the best deal for yourself. They'd rather just get the unpleasantess over with as quickly as possible.
The key, of course, is to enter markets where people value their time more than their money. As soon as you start dealing with customers who value their money more than their time, you've hit the treacherous shoals of business.
Why the investment in research time for the app and the disdain for the coffee which will pass through your system roughly 45 minutes later?
It makes some amount of sense. If I were to impulse-buy every app I saw under $5 that looked like it might be fun or useful, I'd be spending many thousands of dollars a year.
Yes, but if you buy one coffee a day at $4 that is $1,460/yr so buying one app a day is half that (well for $2 apps) or only $750/yr.
Before World of Warcraft came out, I budgeted $50/month on computer games. In the sense the budget was 'committed' in that I had already taken into account spending it, and treated it like an entertainment expense. So spending up to my budget in any given month (with up to one month carry over) I found one could 'impulse' buy without a lot of guilt while not losing control of ones budget. Worked pretty well.
Of course now I don't have a system to play those Win98 games :-(
First, because you have a certain baseline expectation for $4 coffee. If the coffee tastes like asteroid (http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product...), you'll probably complain, and at a minimum you'll never shop there again.
You also have a shop full of other patrons purchasing and appearing to enjoy the coffee.
Shopping online, you normally have neither of those cues. Reviews help somewhat with the latter. Strong refund policies (including the case of "didn't do what I needed it to do") would help with the former.
Apart from that, I don't see it as particularly rational to research a $2 purchase extensively, but on the other hand, when you care about specific functionality, it might make sense to do a bit of research rather than buy every plausible-looking app on the market and see if it has the feature you want.
For me it's not the app's cost so much as the decision to invest time into it (set it up, form new habits, etc.) A cup of coffee requires no time investment -- the equivalent of the app for me would be researching whether I should drink coffee at all or what brand of coffee I should regularly buy.
I wish all reviews on the app store showed how long the reviewer used the app and how many times for this reason.
I can spend hours (well, looong minutes) staring at the coffee aisle in the supermarket but if I'm in Starbucks I have little choice but to take it or leave it.
Maybe the fact that there is so much choice available, be it apps or websites, that it makes it much more tempting to shop around - or just being baffled by choice. You can't make a bad decision if there's no alternative.
That's indeed something worth researching in. First, people are not familiar with credit card micropayments. I wonder what if you had a "snack-machine" for apps that worked with coins, would people buy more apps?
Secondly, a bad app is not the equivalent of just bad tasting coffee, it's coffee that tastes like lemon and makes you puke. It's hard to make coffee that doesnt taste like coffee, while it's easy to make an app that promises one thing and delivers a completely different one.
Third, an app can be malicious, will stay in your system for ever, and the endorphic rewards from it are usually long-term and come in bits. Caffeine reaches your brain within minutes.
Who spends hours researching a $2 app? I've never heard of this.
The only way I might do that is if the app also requires a large time investment. Or if I'm trying to find a new game to play from among thousands. In either case, I'm clearly getting a lot more than $2 of value from the research.
Frequently though, I will just buy a game after hearing about it somewhere and then spending a few minutes looking at the screenshots reviews.
An old friend and business owner spends hours/days researching the best wireless plan for his employees, saving maybe $100. While his books go undone, training never happens, the store is a mess.
So maybe not $2. But consider the most valuable asset anyone has: their time. So easy to squander, an hour is much more valuable than $100.
Isn't one, in consumer terms, a fungible commodity? ie. a latte in one coffee shop is almost identical to another - especially if it's the same franchise?
Despite briefly working in the software field, I got no sympathy because of the way he communicates. Yes, I know how tough software development is. Yes, free software commoditize and runs people out of business. However, they enable the company I used to work for, develops solution that help their client. (I got laid off a few weeks ago)
No, I don't care much about software devs not making enough money in the banks. No, I am not rich, though I have more saving than most people my age. In fact, they're probably in debt.
I don't feel particularly bad for writing open source software for free or scratching my itch for free, even though I am a horrible competitor. They probably can beat me in sales technique and make more money than I ever will.
I recognize being in the software field is an honor, a blessing. It's not something that we have a right to be in. We die or live by solving people's problem and then making money off of them.
I don't recognize piracy as a moral issue, but simply a business model problem, no matter how big of a problem it is.
The whole rant against "free" software is just a straw man--the movement he decries as a cult against charging for software isn't about that at all. The whole idea lies in freedom: the "free as in beer" "free" is the Java to the movements JavaScript. The name is an unfortunate artifact of the English language.
Additionally, it's pretty clearly not an outright lie: you only have to look at the successful ecosystem of free/open source software, and the companies which live on it, to see that it does work. Perhaps it is an exaggeration, but it is no lie.
I'll buy freedom. I buy an arudino and android, and a thing-o-matic though I couldn't afford a thing-o-matic on my earning right now.
When push come to shove, I'll probably stays on android even if the world around me all use iphone just like I use archlinux everyday. Granted, I am in the minority.
Go for a reprap instead. We're much more open-dev and organic (organic is the nicer way of saying chaotic and disorganized I guess). Which continent are you on?
I think it is just because the rant is in response to a strawman who is asking the question. They haven't really looked into free software as an alternative to proprietary software and it really is a shift in thinking about software. It is exactly the kind of response I'd expect from someone who makes their living off of proprietary software and gets ``attacked'' by the RMSes of the world.
It certainly seems like a lie if you use Microsoft Windows and iOS day-in and day-out and account for the free software which does exist by pointing out companies with alternative business models (Red Hat's support business, Google's search/advertising, etc). Then the only unexplained pieces left are those which are run by community (Debian, Apache, etc) and that can be handwaved away by people who donate to those projects or the developers have full-time ``real'' jobs which involves proprietary software. If one explains the existence of free software to themselves in this manner, than all free software requires the proprietary software side to pay developers and thus it is a myth in the sense that one can't have software without some level of proprietary software in the world. These are [likely] inaccurate explanations, but somewhat similar to the author's POV as far as I can tell.
If English didn't have this silly artifact, then the response would be about ridiculing how essentially zero people who use their apps would have any use for the source code so it is ok to keep it from them. Regardless, the point of free software is lost and the developer just doesn't want to be pestered by the RMSes of the world. Similar to how the developer doesn't want to be pestered by people who like to share software and think it does no harm. And not to be pestered by people who assume that s/he is rolling around in money.
How then do you suggest this guy to make money? 'Sell support' on his 2$ weather app that nobody would even look at if it was so hard to use that users would need support? Put ads in it and fight the Adblocker crowd? Find a rich benefactor who wants to 'sponsor' him? I'm running out of options here, what do you suggest?
To be entirely fair, he isn't exactly making money hand over fist now either. It seems assuming that somebody should make money off something as trivial as a weather app isn't necessarily warranted.
However, there is actually a way he could have made money: if somebody wanted a weather app, they could have hired him to write it. This could plausibly either be a carrier seeking to make their phone more attractive or whatever service provides the weather data seeking to make it more accessible. On the one hand, the amount he could possibly make from something like this is limited; on the other hand, the risk is also limited.
The problem with your argument is that you're starting with the assumption that a weather app--particularly one which, I assume, does not get its own data--should be worth a significant amount of money. Just because it would not necessarily be practical to sell the app does not me it would be impractical to make a living as a programmer.
So let me summarize: the guy says not all software should be free and that he wants to make money, you dismiss it with 'oh he's just stuck in old ways of thinking and he should find other ways to make money', I ask how, and then you say maybe he just shouldn't make money at all? That's just putting the cart before the horse - starting at a fundamentalist position and coming to conclusions that are completely out of whack with reality.
Nobody will pay the 15k or whatever it costs to have a custom app developed just for a weather app, even if people find it useful. So, the traditional (and common sense) model was to split the costs over all people who would be interested in such an app. The developer would take the risk, develop and market it, and people would pay for it; and once the development costs were covered, the profit was for the developer. Simple and, if I may say, quite reasonable.
But now you come and start with an assumption that the app should be free, then the business becomes untenable and the app won't be developed in the first place, and you say that maybe that's how it's supposed to be? How does that make sense?
I think you are willfully misrepresenting my arguments. First, my initial post had two points: one, his argument is entirely fallacious and two, free software can and does work. I never claimed anything about all software having to be free or even that "he's stuck in old ways of thinking..." (which really sounds like a personal attack more than anything).
Secondly, my point about money was based on the fact that, in the same article, he admitted to being in the red. If he is losing money on this model, the assumption that any reasonable model will lead to his making money is unwarranted.
Finally, I don't see why nobody would pay to have a weather app. Plenty of companies give such things away for free right now; I see no reason it would not be carried over to Android. For an example, just search for "weather" on Google. While this is not open source, it is free so from an economic stand-point it is almost equivalent. Additionally, I could definitely see somebody like Samsung funding this in order to add a "feature" to their phone. Besides, there are actually several free and open source weather widgets for KDE, so it's clearly practical to have them.
On a completely unrelated note, there really seems to be something about the free software movement that engenders straw man arguments. Perhaps some of its supporters are too zealous, or maybe the arguments behind it are insufficiently clear. Or maybe it's just that most people don't really understand what it's all about.
The current model is rather indirect. The author spends x amount of time developing the app and then they release it. Not until he has y downloads will he have recouped his initial development costs and he will continue to earn money well past the mark of y downloads.
I think selling upgrades to apps would partially help, as it would encourage updates due to the possibility of recouping the costs from an existing customer base as well as allow the app to meet multiple points along a price/functionality curve.
They could release source code and sell it anyways. The problem there is that someone else could compile it and sell it on the app store to undercut him. I'm not sure what kind of recourse (if any) the developer would have in such a situation, thus I doubt releasing source is viable.
The rich benefactor idea is clearly in jest, since such arrangements are rare. Yet, corporations pay people to work on open source code. As long as the business can get their value out of a piece of software and it isn't core to their business model, there is very little reason why the code shouldn't be able to be open.
Regardless, I don't think the indie developer cares about software freedom, they just don't want to be pestered by free software advocates. They don't see anything wrong with their business model so even if there was an alternative (and there is very little in the way of alternatives except to look for customers to pay and then develop the app instead of the other way around), I doubt this indie developer would care.
you only have to look at the successful ecosystem of free/open source software
I'm not going to say that the free/open source software ecosystem is not successful, but I will say it is orders of magnitude less successful that commercial software.
"Then you see an app like ’101 sex positions’ or ’301 Fart Noises’ reach the lofty heights of App Store Success. They spent a week on a gimmick and made bank, you spent 6 months building an app of utility and are struggling."
So why not go make your own fart or sex app? There's a reason why these apps make it to the top; it's what people really want. Sadly or not, there's always going to be a bigger potential market for dumb, entertaining apps than your average practical app. I'd even go so far to say there's an art to producing the kind of apps that satisfy this segment of the market.
In related news, a script called "spark: ▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell" has over 1,200 watchers and 79 forks on github at the moment.
Scipy is a monumental and long-running effort of creating a scientific library for Python. It's an incredibly advanced piece of software that quite possibly saves lives (literally), and has 207 watchers and 78 forks.
It's just what people really want. I'd even go so far to say there's an art to producing the kind of apps that satisfy this segment of HN.
I believe the Numpy/Scipy official repositories are on sourcefourge and it has its own website. The github page appears to be the main web presence of Spark. I think of Numpy/Scipy as more conservative library not exactly the best github match. I know that Numpy/Scipy are vastly more important/discussed/used then Spark.
It's not just that. Spark is smaller, easy to understand, easy to modify, and grabbing someone's modified version is unlikely to make your data invalid. Complex codebases with a lot of functionality are less approachable, and having to verify that each change does not compromise its functionality discourages the use of as many forks.
Indeed. I spent ~6 hours writing a gun "simulator" app that's made something like $50,000. Some of it was luck, but if you're willing to sell your soul and you can crank out a few of these a week your chances of success are probably higher than spending 6 months perfecting a single app you don't even know anyone wants.
Why sell your soul and make that decision? Why not do both, and try spending half your time creating trivial fart apps - shouldn't take more than a few hours, right? which you need to get away from your main project that's going to change the way I use my smartphone, etc., etc.
If we're offering advice from the peanut gallery (and I'm no smartphone developer, so I'm way up in the peanut gallery), why not spend that time on a program that can generate trivial apps.
Extract data [legally, now!] from some source (eg wikipedia), and skin it with some boilerplate and some generated UI elements. I think it'd be a more interesting project to implement the more general version, and once it's nailed down it's probably a better source of revenue too.
> This comment looks casual, but with $50,000 you don't have to work anymore until the end of life.
Sadly, $50,000 doesn't go far here in the US. Don't get me wrong - it's definitely a nice chunk of change, but it's far from "don't have to work anymore" land. It's more in the "pay off one's student loans/credit card debt" area of things.
Where I live, average home prices seem to be around $320k, so this would barely cover a down-payment.
> There's a reason why these apps make it to the top; it's what people really want.
I think Apple as a monopolist intermediary (assuming we are talking about the iPhone market) has more of a role here than this invisible-hand argument implies.
It's Apple's choice to promote a top-N listing, which means that the already most popular apps get even more downloads. Fair enough, you might think, but it's Apple's choice how they count the top N. If they count number of purchases, then throwaway $1 apps will be favored over more substantial, more expensive apps; whereas if they count highest grossing, the more expensive apps will fare better.
It took a certain kind of genius to realize that people wanted their phones to fart. I would make a gimmick app if I could think up a successful gimmick, but all I can seem to come up with is deeply interesting games.
Jiggy's comment[1] about why Coffee != Apps to be spot on. Your app is an unknown quantity, getting someone to spend anything on an unknown quantity is really really hard.
When you go to McDonald's (or anyone for that matter) do you get something different every time, or do you get your favorite thing? Same goes for Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factory, did you get the burger last time and the fresh fish catch this time?
Probably not.
To some degree, those fart apps are a known quantity; they make fart noises, so they have the advantage over your app of having their foot in the door for everyone interested.
It seems unfair, but there has to be a strategy there for riding that wave. Hollywood has always done it, did you enjoy Superman 7 or Harry Potter 14?
It doesn't matter, it was a known quantity and eleventeen million people went and saw it.
It seems like SJ is being forced to learn this lesson over-and-over again[2] and I've already shared my thoughts with you about that[3].
Your expectations of what you want SJ to do and exactly how you want it to do it may be too tight. You guys are clearly talented and I wonder if you need some step-back-and-get-a-better-perspective time.
Tom's comment[4] is a great example of what I mean. Does ShiftyJelly want to get into the gun or fart-app business? Probably not... does SJ want $50k? Probably yes.
It feels to me like there is some unexpected pivot in here for you guys to extract; one that you didn't see coming, but one that works out surprisingly well for you.
NOTE: Make the two app references at the end of the article links to the appstore.
Take a look through Github or Sourceforge. Many, many of the projects are people scratching an itch or just building something for fun. We can argue about the exact percentage, but it's definitely more than "very few bits".
Github and Sourceforge are supported via paying customers or advertising. =)
The point isn't that all software isn't paid for. Rather, that somewhere, it's costing someone money. And I think that was the point (or at least, that's what I got from it, which is the important part).
I was referring to the software on Github and Sourceforge, not Github and Sourceforge themselves.
Some software costs someone money. Lots of it is built for the sake of building it though. You could argue that time people spend building software could have been billable hours, but I think the author totally misunderstands the spirit of building software for the enjoyment of it.
> I was referring to the software on Github and Sourceforge, not Github and Sourceforge themselves.
So was I. And this software is being supported by SF and Github.
> I think the author totally misunderstands the spirit of building software for the enjoyment of it.
Which means nothing.
Consider Linus and Linux. Linux wasn't paid for directly, but don't for a minute think it wasn't supported by someone's cash.
In fact, I challenge you to find me software that didn't use someone's real money (not this billable hours thing you brought to the table for some reason) to get developed at some point.
I don't understand your argument that the software is being supported by SF and Github. Github and SF didn't spend a cent to develop any of those projects; they were created and then hosted there. If I hosted my open source software on my Linode account would you say that it's paid because I spent my own money to pay for Linode?
You picked one example in which someone gets paid to write software, but there are hundreds of thousands of software projects that were written in people's spare time, either for fun or to learn to code or to scratch their own (non-monetary) itch.
Here's a random one from the HN frontpage last week:
a very good post, but he seemed a little confused with the open source / free software paradigm. He must have known that open source software can be charged, the point is that you have to share the source code you are selling!!
I'm so glad they wrote about piracy and made the points about how Not all software should be free. Honestly, I'll never understand that sense of entitlement people have. I was once in the same boat as the author, pirating everything under the sun. Then I got a job writing code too and I haven't pirated a single thing since. I don't sell software but I appreciate the work that goes into it and understand that these guys lose out even if I didn't have money to pay to begin with. The no money argument and the free marketing arguments are bunk. The poor will save to buy if there's no pirate copy and the majority of marketing you get from a pirated app is marketing that links to the pirate download, not the legit one!
I've been wondering if independent software vendors might benefit from some humanizing of the sales effort. Instead of charging $2 for an app, how about framing it as "buy the developer a taco", or for $4 "buy the developer a grande latte". The amazing $10 app could be "buy the developer a roll of sushi". You get the idea.
Psychologically, I find it much more satisfying to be rewarding friends & associates with more tangible things than some dollar amount.
Does anyone know if this model has been attempted before?
This is exactly the opposite of the pricing psychology ISVs benefit from. Good anchors for pricing are not cheap, disposable items but rather expensive, valuable economic inputs like "your fully loaded cost for $TIME."
I know a dev or two with "buy me a beer" buttons. Anecdotally, one of those buttons plus $5 will buy you a beer.
Personally, I find it quite humiliating to have to (almost literally) beg for food just to be paid for work done, which in every single other aspect of life is considered perfectly normal.
Plus, how much does it really help? There are so many people with 'donate' buttons on their website who don't get enough 'donations' each year to even eat a single meal.
It flips it around to begging and belittling the time spent.
A far better proposition is just charging what you think it is worth and advertising the benefits to the buyer. Telling the buyer you're going to get a sushi roll doesn't assist them. Telling them they save x hours a week, or avoid situation y - now that's better marketing.
Because the item is a copy, and (digital) copies actually do cost nothing. That is just the physical fact, and people will always have some underlying sense of it -- as they should.
The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural. Humans are evolved to copy and share information -- that is the most effective behaviour. The problem is not people's inclinations, the problem is copyright/IP. You possibly can make some case that IP is a net positive system (although no-one seems to have found any evidence), but nevertheless, its essential structure/mechanism is intrinsically problematic.
Lots of ideas, and yet you completely miss the point.
You're not even talking about the same thing: the parent talks about piracy from an ethical point of view. Meanwhile, you reply with the physical point of view, saying the item is an exact duplicate that cost nothing to produce.
Representation doesn't mean a damn thing. It doesn't justify behavior.
Ethics is grounded in physical reality, that is sort-of where the buck stops -- at least it seems a better place than anywhere else. Surely an ethical evalution of an act depends on what the act is.
What makes an act bad? If, for example, you say stealing is bad, and are asked why, you can reply that someone loses something -- they could do things with it before, but no longer can. There is a sense of harm, in basic physical terms that we can all pretty much agree upon, simply because we all share the same basic physical condition.
But what if it were possible to steal something without taking anything away from someone -- i.e. the basic physical effect is different. Is that still bad? In what way could it be? You could just institute a rule proscribing such an act anyway, and so breaking the rule might seem bad superficially. But that would be like ruling that no-one can go out in the sun on wednesdays -- surely at some point someone will ask why. And there would not seem to be a good answer.
That is the way copying is different from taking. Because, at bottom, it does not do anything harmful, and is in fact positive. And that is why people are probably likely to have some underlying sense that copying is morally OK.
Sure there will, but it depends on whether you are empathetic to the condition of other human beings. A small software vendor sells their product. In effect, they're saying, either pay for a piece of software, or do without it. I could violate that contract, but then I'd be an asshole, because they asked for payment, yet I went and took it without paying.
I wish to treat other human beings with respect, especially creators. I may hate copyright, but that doesn't mean I take it out on creators. Their works enrich my life in ways I never would have imagined, and I'm pleased to be able to support them. Jason Fried of 37Signals had a quote recently where he mentioned that, in the case of good products, people are happy to pay for them.
Anything digital is inherently valueless. There is no cost to copy it. In a perfectly free market, it would be completely valueless. It is only given value by our legal system of copyright laws.
I say this as a software developer and one who is not libertarian in the least.
Bullshit. Free market or not, that's an entirely one dimensional view on the value of software. Plenty of software has value -- the software that makes a business more productive, competitive or saves it money has inherent value, not to mention applications in other areas.
Competent business owners, managers and technical people making decisions about the implementation of software are very interested in the value of that software and its value to business is exactly why we have an economy that exchanges money for these things.
I wasn't just talking about software. I was talking about movies, books, music, images, anything that can be digitized. As soon as it's digital, there's a nearly infinite supply. Unless you can find a way to limit that supply the price (sorry, I meant price when I said value) will drop to zero. We currently have legal methods of limiting that supply -- by giving the creator legal control of how digital things get copied. But the difficulty of stamping out piracy even with these legal counter-measures is a testament to how artificial that really is.
There are some cases where it is possible to limit the supply of digital goods, and this is best seen in software where access to the code can be limited or the code can be written to be restricted in some way, especially in compiled software or web applications. But this, too, can often be hacked.
Note, I'm no fan of free markets. I think they are an enormously clumsy tool for linking 'price' to 'value'.
> Anything digital is inherently valueless. There is no cost to copy it.
Wouldn't books, then, only be "worth" the cost of the paper on which they're printed? How does making something digital automatically destroy any inherent value?
Sorry, I meant price where I said value and now can't edit it.
But look at it this way, for anything digital the supply is infinite. We currently have legal methods of restricting the supply and some attempts at software or digital methods of restricting it. But even so, the difficulty we've had stamping out illegal piracy is a testament to how artificial and fragile these methods are. With truly infinite supply, the price will always be zero. Why should I pay for something I can create copies of with 'cntrl+c' and 'cntrl+v' ? The only thing that leads me to pay for basically anything is that I can't simply recreate it on my own. The day 3D printers reach the versatility of Star Trek replicators is the day a price based market economy will collapse completely. With infinite supply, there's no need to pay for anything.
Fair. Thank you for the correction. But I think this is, personally, one of my problems with free market economics. It conflates value and price too much. If you make a piece of software, or music, or a book and cannot control it's being copied, then how can a market assign value to it? The price is zero. Period. It's free. Unless you can somehow prevent it from being copied. And even with the restrictions of law, we've seen that that is nearly impossible.
The only reason price based markets even work for any other sort of exchange is because there is limited supply. With anything digital the supply is inherently unlimited.
"Because the item is a copy, and (digital) copies actually do cost nothing. That is just the physical fact, and people will always have some underlying sense of it -- as they should."
So why don't people have the same mindset about currency?
It's just ink and paper that represents a perceived value...very similar to the way digital items work.
How about art? It's just paint and paper.
Digital copies may cost nothing, but the original usually costs thousands of man-hours and or lots of money.
"The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural"
In the programming community, it seems only unnatural when it involves proprietary software. If a company uses GNU software without giving back to the community (the currency involved with OSS), people here want heads to roll. Just look at any discussion here in HN that involved the thesis theme. Many, many people called him a "thief" and that he "stole" code from Wordpress. In reality, nothing was "stolen" (using your logic).
Your mindset will eventually cause the following:
1) Developer wages will decrease over time
2) Most companies will just have a web service as opposed to an app. It means you will be paying a monthly fee for software and it will cost more to the end-user in the long-run.
Isn't that why Software-as-a-Service is much more palatable to a purchaser? It feels like your company is actually doing something for the money spent.
If you were to sell the software as a download, people would demand lower prices, since 'after all' they're doing all the work (and hosting is cheap). It's an interesting dichotomy.
It is so true, and so weird at the same time. Why the investment in research time for the app and the disdain for the coffee which will pass through your system roughly 45 minutes later? Makes me wonder if they should charge $19.99 for the app and offer a 'trial version' for $4.99 which lets you see if you want to buy it with no expiration date.