I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).
Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).
Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.
Holy shit. Hold on to that plumber, lol.
He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.
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.
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.
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.
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.