I've seen a pretty big uptick in sales on the Mac App Store since I temporarily dropped the price from $9.99 to $4.99 for that 512 Pixels ad campaign, which has me thinking about software pricing in general.

I was originally thinking $10 instead of $5 because what does $5 mean to anybody anyway? A Starbucks with tip might be $8, and that's every day. Mojave Paint is one time (or maybe more like once a year when I figure out how to have a limited period of software updates included.)

But then I got to thinking more about it. A Starbucks drink has facilities overhead, people milking cows, employees with health insurance, coffee beans that go through a rather involved process from raw pod to roasted bean. A lot goes into it! You're getting something real and physical for your $8.

Software like Mojave Paint, which has no real infrastructural component and runs on your own machine, has a marginal cost to me of nearly 0. But I have to charge something to pay myself for my time.

Here's what really cemented it in my mind… I keep an eye on r/macapps to see what people are building with a special interest in any photo or graphics apps, and a couple months ago someone posted about DrawSimple, no free trial but $5 in the Mac App Store. I bought it just to check it out. And I don't think I would have if it were $10. What's $5 to me, nothing really, but it is a psychological barrier for sure.

So, $4.99 one-time purchase, perhaps still with future sales of $2.99.

And as far as how to do a "buy once, use forever, but you get a limited duration of updates" model, like how Sublime Text does, I'm still thinking about that. It won't be easy to do in the Mac App Store. I have some ideas but that's another blog post.