Think Before You Price

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Majesty Software hasn’t broken any sales records with its iPhone apps. It’s most recent release, Contactile, barely made a blip on the sales charts when it debuted a few days ago. I can count the total number of paid sales without taking off my shoes. The sheer number of apps on the store makes it quite challenging for small, obscure vendors to gain traction.

So, after a brief time in the lowest price tier (that’s just 99 cents in the US), Contactile is now a free app. The next planned release will sport a few enhancements and is likely to include iAds as a potential means of generating revenue. I’d rather not alienate the handful of people that paid for their copy, but the sales numbers are just so small that the burden of maintaining separate paid and lite versions is hard to justify.

In hindsight, I wish I had made Contactile ad-ware from the outset. That would have avoided the dilemma of having an ad-supported update go to people that paid for the initial release.

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