Regarding MacHeist
You may have come across the new MacHeist Bundle. As always it‘s an insanely good deal. Currently you get 9 applications for $39. And they sell a lot of these bundles. Obviously this is really great for the customer. And though I did not buy a bundle myself I fully understand why anyone would go for it. But what is in there for the developers?
Simone Manganelli just wrote a piece about it and is making the math behind it. So obviously the average software developer is getting 2-3% of it‘s original product value. Yes, this is it. Not more. There is no doubt about it. As John Gruber says the question is not if this is a good deal but if this is a good business strategy.
I just looked over the applications in the bundle and noticed that the price point is varying a lot. Normally you are calculating the price of your apps with the target group in mind. So if you have a consumer app you sell it for let‘s say $39. If you have a really sophisticated app for professionals you sell it for $99 or more. Problem is that every product only has one target group that can be narrowed or widened a bit. Meaning with there $39 price point MacHeist is targeting consumer customers only. For a developer of a consumer app it means a good thing, since MacHeist is selling the software to the people who are most likely to update it next time you charge for it. For a developer of a pro app this means a bad thing, since you are not only giving away your software for practically no price, you are also giving it to people who do not even care about it.
You can assume that most people who are buying MacHeist bundles are only interested in one app particular and they do not have a problem with the price anymore because they get the other apps as a bonus. The only hope you as a developer can have is that this app is yours and that the customer will get so accustomed to it that he is going update your app the next time you have a paid update available. This also means that you propably should have an imminent update in your product queue, let‘s say in 2-3 months. Now what I noticed is that some of the MacHeist apps are brand new. This does not make any sense to me. If you have a new product you should first get it out to the people who are actually willing to pay you the price the product is really worth, not giving it for free to the same people! You are not only loosing the 97% percent to MacHeist, you are also loosing a lot of money in you‘re very own web store.
To sum it up, in my opinion MacHeist really only makes sense for a certain group of software products. For some developers MacHeist is a big opportunity to get there apps known and to collect money from updates afterwards. But to other developers MacHeist is a big money annihilation machine.
March 26th, 2009 • Permalink
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