I’m CEO of Moonlighting, a 10-person startup in Argentina. Something I’ve learnt in my 7+ years developing and selling photo-editing apps is that it’s extremely hard to convert users from a free, limited version, to the full and paid version.
We know that it’s not because our apps are bad: we get all kinds of compliments and good reviews, and yes, some people buy our apps. But still, our conversion numbers are low and we struggle to make a living. Why? You can argue that we have bad marketing, paid and organic, or other factors, but even when our app SuperPhoto went viral and got lots of downloads, few people converted.
I suspect the core issue is more universal than just us and our apps: software development is just grossly underestimated by users. Regular people don’t have any idea how much it costs (in both time and money) to develop and maintain good software (and let’s not even consider customer support, backend servers, and so on). Anything that is more than $ 0.99 is “too much”, and surely the developers are “greedy” and want to extort users. We regularly receive hate emails and negative app reviews by people (I think) otherwise well educated. Here’s some examples of what people complain about:
- There are ads or watermarks or locked stuff in the (free and fully functional) app.
- The charge is not refunded if users use the app for (say, a couple of years) but one day decide they don’t want or need the app anymore, for diverse reasons like changing their phone or losing interest. (In fact, all these emails always ask for “their” money back, as if the original transaction was actually a deposit and money never changed hands).
- If a version of one app is bought for one platform, it must be given for free on all other platforms. We regularly get heat for that, even if we explain that developing for different platforms is costly and not free to us.
- An app has to be sold once and upgraded forever: people refuse to pay more than one time for an app, even if the developers need to continue working and upgrading the app.
And this is just a small excerpt — believe me, I’ve seen so many bizarre and angry emails that it seems that people really believe that apps should be 100% free. Why is this? I don’t expect to go into a coffee shop and have a latte be given to me for free. Or go to a book shop and take a book home, read it and then go back and ask for the money. But software is a different story. People assign less value to it and refuse to pay for it, no matter what.
App Stores and big companies aren’t helping
App stores don’t help because once one publishes an app, it has to be upgraded for free forever. Paid upgrades, where one releases an update and charges for it, are not allowed — although it would be trivial to implement by the stores. So developers have no incentive to work on upgrades. Some people suggest selling add-ons or expansions, but this only works for some settings, like games. In our case of photo-editing apps, a lot of the work involves updating the app so it doesn’t feel old and works OK on the latest OSes (iOS and Android for example get updated periodically, not just UI but core APIs often change radically), or optimizing the core filter algorithms, or upgrading the graphics engines (e.g., moving from CPU to GPU processing). We could just release new filters and charge for those, but it’s not really what we want to do, which is to continue improving the core app. App stores also make it harder for indie developers by letting users share the app with their family members and multiple devices for the same instance of a paid app.
Also, other app developers make the situation worse because they just give out everything for free: e.g. MSQRD or Prisma in our category. No ads, no premium capabilities, no in-app purchases, nothing. Why? Because they don’t aim at living off the users, but rather selling the app to some big company. But then users take the example and criticize other developers because they don’t give everything out for free.
Apple has announced that it will allow recurrent subscriptions to be enabled to all apps in the future and not just content-based apps like magazines. But the issue is that users dislike paying a subscription for something that isn’t really a service or refreshed content, and feel ripped off by devs. It’s understandable that it doesn’t really fit well, a paid upgrade is more suitable since people would understand better that they’re paying for software features and development, not just content.
Our future, at stake
So far we’ve always sold our apps by an unlock-forever setting. But it hasn’t really worked for us, since we’re struggling to make a living, and we live in a cheap place (Argentina). Our new app, Painnt, uses neural style networks and AI to filter photos. The filters look like Prisma but the processing is fully local. There are many advantages in filtering straight on your device, but it’s much harder to code for than on a GPU backend. Painnt is released with a temporal unlock (non-recurrent subscriptions), to enable us to continue working on it in the long term. We know people will complain, but we don’t think there’s currently another reasonable option for supporting us and our apps in the long term. Will it work for us? We know a lot of other small indie developers are in the same situation like us, and I think that none can or will survive if things don’t change and regular users change their mind.
Thoughts? Agree/disagree? Leave a comment below!