How should I price my app?

You might happily pay 4-5$ for a cup of coffee, but paying 99 cents for a useful app seems far-fetched.

You should keep this in mind if you are thinking of getting an app developed. Nowadays, almost every single successful app is priced FREE. In this article, we aim to provide some useful advice to help you price your app better. You are probably thinking, “wait, it costs me thousands of dollars to develop an app, how can I give it out for free?” Don’t worry almost everyone feels the same. This is until you realise that there are various other ways to monetise your apps. I will briefly discuss some of the options:

Use advertisements:

Although it takes some time and a decent user base to make some money from this, it is a good place to start. If your app was priced at 99 cents, then once someone pays for it once, you will not get any further revenue. With ads, however, the revenue can be recurring.

In-app purchases:

This is one of the most popular methods of monetising your app. Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and almost every other game has in-app purchases. Offer your app for free, but have additional content available for purchases.

Freemium model:

Offer a demo version of your app for free. Once your users are convinced that the app is of great value, ask them to pay a fee to unlock the full features.

“Offer a demo version of your app for free. Once your users are convinced that the app is of great value, ask them to pay a fee to unlock the full features”

There are additional strategies you can use to monetise your apps. As always, you can get creative and explore these yourself. Back to our previous discussion, why are people not willing to pay 99 cents for an app? It is hard to answer this question but a variety of answers are possible.

From studying Economics, we know that consumers value gains more than they fear losses. If they can avoid paying 10 cents for something, they will try and do so. You see this happen all the time. In supermarkets, people spend hundreds of dollars purchasing groceries but when the cashier says “15 cents for a bag”, this seems expensive. Similarly, app users might be thinking, “I can probably find a similar app for free, if I do enough research”, stopping them from pressing the buy button. Having said these, people are still willing to purchase apps that are truly useful. These are generally productivity and utility apps. Sleep Cycle, is an example of such an app, it costs just under $1.50 to download, but it is an app that makes your life easier.