@br3t: Thanks for taking the time to comment. I understand what you’re saying; we got one other comment via email along the same lines, and we did think about that exact problem before deciding on our pricing. The issue we had, and have, is we don’t know of a straightforward way to charge early owners of Emerald Chronometer (the ones like you who paid $5 for it) differently from the newer ones who are paying $2. Apple doesn’t give us any information about our customers, so we have no way to decide how much to charge for the upgrade. (Also, adding ‘in-app purchasing’ would have been another chunk of work for us, though that wasn’t a huge factor in our decision). And Apple doesn’t allow us to charge different people different prices for the same product (EC HD), so there would be no way to give a discount on a new product purchase to some customers and not others. We could have avoided the issue by keeping EC’s price constant rather than dropping it to $2, but we really wanted to get it more in line with other similar iPhone apps (it was only selling 3 or 4 copies per day), and we did want to lower the cost of owning both products for at least the new customers. It’s unfortunate but there are many cases where the initial adopters of a product, the ones who make it possible to go forward, often wind up footing more of the bill than those that come later.

In the end we’re engineers, not pricing experts (though we’re learning!), and while we’d like to get some money back for our efforts our primary goal is to have fun and to get something out there that people will enjoy. So we do what we can that seems not to be too wrong and go back to the “real work” of writing software, designing displays, and documenting how it all works. We think we can produce more value that way. And it’s surely more fun. 🙂

If it’s any consolation (and I realize it may not be), if the price of EC reflected what it actually cost to develop, divided by the number of customers that have bought it in the past 3 years, it would cost about $30, rather than the $5 that EC HD costs or the $2 we’re now charging for EC. Because this is a hobby for Bill and me we effectively subsidize its development ourselves by “donating” our time far and above what we get back in revenue. We do this because we love what we do and we get a buzz from having other people enjoy what we make. We’ll hold no ill will towards anyone who thinks we’re not being fair or who thinks we’re charging too much and decides not to purchase, but we can tell you with no doubt whatsoever that the cost of owning either of these products, or even both of them if you paid the original $5 for EC, doesn’t begin to cover the cost of developing them.

– Steve