• Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    13 days ago

    This is a really basic business concept; business 101 stuff. They definitely didn’t make it up, they’re just using it.

    It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.

    Buy shit because you need/want it, not because it’s a deal.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      Same reason that shit on TV is five easy payments of 29.95.

      I’m willing g to spend $29. I’ll even spend $29 five times. But not $150.

      • AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        13 days ago

        The only time this breaks down for me though is that I still struggle to pay $0.99 for a mobile app I use often sometimes. Really not sure what it is.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.

          • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            13 days ago

            Yeah. I used to have a $20 shareware product back when kagi was a payment processor. Apple introduced $1 pricing as a dick waving contest and fucked the entire indy developer community.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              12 days ago

              I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.

              I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.