The awkward conversation of going premium
Discussing the tricky subject of paying for apps
There’s a stigma around paying for applications.
For years, funded start-ups ruled the App Stores with their well-crafted resources layered with freemium for all, in an effort to retain the masses.
Naturally over time, our minds have become attuned to this model.
In the last 24 months, this mindset has shifted with the most popular applications being forced to head towards a paid model to help stabilise their development efforts and growth.
Naturally over time, our minds have become attuned to freemium.
The new default experience has changed the way we think about apps and tools but helped us to understand the sustainability of this ecosystem.
So how did we arrive here?
The Rise of Premium
It all started with the rise of the App Store.
Steve Jobs announced the iOS App Store back in 2008. One of the momentous launches of Apple, the store became a hub of creativity and talent, with start-ups and businesses flocking for attention on the fresh new marketplace.
This new marketplace introduced a new world for developers to craft applications and sell them to the world. The most popular apps sold between $0.99 and $9.99 with Apple cutting out 30% of the fee to cover the costs of hosting the applications on their platform.
This revolution brought the first wave of one-off fee applications.
Over 5 years this slowly evolved into the first set of applications that offered premium. Premium was a layer within an application, a recurring fee that allowed developers to make money on a regular basis with applications.
By this time, a lot of developers were funding their efforts with one-off fees and a layer of premium, with very little need to upgrade. So the space was still very much scared of the concept to upfront payment.
The change came when funded application realised this could no longer be sustainable for the future of their service.
Softwares that spanned across devices became hidden behind a paywall and long-standing applications began aggressively monetising their app through ads, recurring fees and higher paywalls.
Money supports development
You are probably wondering why do developers need so much money.
Well development isn’t cheap and neither are servers costs as you grow your user base, those services you love might not have had a hefty $400M check thrown at them, making their upfront costs higher and running costs even tougher to combat.
The more recent changes in premium pricing is a reflection of the sustainability needed to keep these resources running.
Let’s take Ulysses for an example.
This long-standing writing application for Mac & iOS recently made the move to a more aggressive subscription model. The recent move caused a lot of stirs in the space, but will help support the sustainability of the resource for many years, if successful. Ulysses the reasoning of their switch very well.
Even, popular services like Evernote have come under scrutiny when moving to a new model of pricing. A jump in pricing for Evernote was a pain point for many users but reflected their need to support growth, drive feature development and keep up with server costs.
Granted there are exceptions, Strava, the popular cycling app is one of those. Strava sells the collective cycling data over the year to city councils across the US and the world in an effort, this data is the general routes taken by cyclists using Strava to help map the routes of cyclists in a city, not direct user data.
There are many other apps who do a similar tactic to this But even Strava have a premium layer to help continue and fund the projects they work on.
When to go premium?
The way I see premium applications is that if you can directly correlate a monetary value to each software, then there’s a need to pay.
I’m willing to pay for an experience that makes me money or even that delivers me an experience I’m happy with.
With more and more applications heading for a subscription-based we need to get comfortable with this idea of supporting the tools we use, in the same way we pay for the clothes on us right now (well, I hope so) we need to consider that these experience we interact are almost as important.
Even with services like Medium, offering a membership, I am so pleased with my Medium service and experience that I want to support them, so I contribute $5 a month to that service, granted you get a snazzy badge, but I understand services need to exist and I’m willing to support them.
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