How to price your app properly?
I’m building a Mac app, but I’m not really sure how to price it properly. I’ve read a lot of posts here, especially discussions about pricing, and it seems that once a lifetime price goes above $10, many people already feel it’s too expensive. At the same time, a lot of relatively simple tools are priced around $6, and people seem perfectly happy with that. But whenever subscriptions are mentioned, people here seem strongly against them. I’m definitely not a pricing expert, but I do understand a few basic things: You need to set a price that can keep the business sustainable and support ongoing development and maintenance. Pricing should be tied more to the value provided than to the development cost itself. It’s important to compare competitor pricing if you’re offering something similar, since the market ultimately decides what a product is worth. Still, there are many things I’m unsure about. For those who have priced or adjusted the pricing of their own apps, could you share the logic behind your decisions? What worked, and what didn’t?
Collected discussion
honestly the $6-9 one-time sweet spot is real. I've bought apps at $15+ without hesitation when the value was obvious, but anything that feels like a "nice to have" I'll pass on above $8. the key is making the value proposition crystal clear on the landing page before they even see the price
Well, what does it do? How was it developed? How long has it been in beta? Is there documentation? What you are asking is a contextual question without any context.
Thanks for asking. I am building a tool, I call it Mac Butler. What it does right now: Clean Quick Clean and Deep Clean can find large amounts of freeable space from things like Docker data, node_modules, Xcode caches, browser caches, logs, installers, and Trash. On dev-heavy Macs, this can easily be 20GB+. Disk Map gives you a visual map of large files and folders, so you can quickly spot things like Docker volumes, old backups, forgotten project folders, video files, or huge dependency folders. Screenshot Cleaner can find screenshots across your folders and help you review and remove hundreds of old screenshots in one pass. Duplicate Finder uses content hashing to find real duplicate files, not just files with similar names, so you can free space quickly. Organize Butler looks across the places clutter tends to hide, so you do not have to dig through every folder manually. Folder Organizer can organize a messy folder in seconds using rules, and supported moves can be restored if you do not like the result. App Manager can find installed apps, show their storage footprint, and help uninstall apps together with leftover support files and caches. Optimize Butler helps you see what is using resources and offload apps you are not actively using, so more performance goes to your current work. Butler can show which apps are using the most CPU and memory. It can help pause inactive heavy apps to release CPU. It can also pause apps to free memory for the work you are actually doing right now. Understand Only when you understand what is happening on your Mac can you confidently customize it for your own use, cut through the bloat, and make sure it serves you well. So anywhere in Butler, you can ask in a sidebar ai chat. If you are not sure which file is safe to delete, ask Butler from that screen. If you are not sure which app to pause, ask. If your Mac feels slow and you do not know why, ask Butler to explain what it sees. All run locally, except you ask AI. It also try to automate all those at the time you picked. All the chat will be saved locally as well. My current pricing draft ideas: I want to keep the Clean, Organize, and Optimize features free if users choose to do them manually. The BYOK + Automation plan would cost $0.99/month. If users want to use our built-in AI (Google Gemini), I’m not sure what the right price should be yet — maybe $1.99 or $2.99/month. I’m still not sure whether that would be enough to cover the costs. I’m also considering a lifetime purchase option, maybe around $12 for the BYOK + Automation plan. The Lite version would remain free. What do you think?
there's a factor I don't see mentioned: the cheaper people pay, pretty often the more they demand later :) there are tons of memes about "50$ client vs 500$ client" and amount of hassle that comes from them sometimes it makes sense to raise the pricing to a fair level if your product is good, even if some other tools are cheaper or vast majority of people prefer to pay 5$ maybe you yourself thought in the past that "that's suspiciously cheap" etc, soooo
Yes, we should be very careful with something we can’t deliver, especially when there are thousands of free riders, they don’t pay but they still need support. And we should provide support for them as free users is also provide value in the product community, such as their feedbacks and also their use cases.
Make a test and then watch conversion and feedback. Almost any price would receive the complaint. But complaints don’t always equal lost sales. Conversion and data would tell you how to decide.
Thanks! Will do, just want to have a rough start points to test the water.
Imo one of the more logical ways of creating an app that becomes well-established is: Create a good app that people need or find fun. The MVP, or slightly beyond that. Make it free or extremely cheap. Gather as much feedback as you can. Improve your product. Build a loyal user base. Upon launch of v.1. offer your loyal user base your improved product at a discount (50% minimum). Make valuable big updates every 1 - 1.5 year. Make them paid, offer them at a discount (50% minimum). New users who come lateron, lured by the buzz around your app (Reddit, MAS, SetApp, Product Hunt, YouTube and all kinds of other sites), pay full price. And get updates at a discount. Consider making basic features free. And pro versions paid. No subscriptions if you do not have server costs or offer a paid AI subscription. Price market-based. Make it cheaper when a competitor is better. Make it slightly more expensive if you have a real USP.
Well, this is much closer to my instinct. I actually have a broader theory around this. If I think about it from a purely rational perspective, the best outcome — both for users and for developers in the long run — is often the model companies like Google use: make the core product free for users, and monetize somewhere else if you can afford to do so. For example, Google gives away products like Search, Gmail, Docs, and Maps for free because the massive user adoption creates value in other ways, mainly through advertising, ecosystem growth, and long-term platform dominance. Another example is how some AI tools offer free basic features to attract users, then monetize through enterprise plans, premium automation, integrations, or advanced capabilities. If I had the resources to support that approach, that would probably be my ideal strategy as well. I’d rather make the core experience accessible to everyone and only charge for the parts that create significant additional value — especially automation, AI-driven support, or features that save people meaningful time every week. And this only works when your free version also the best in quality, like google's products. Well, maybe not many people agree with me on this, but I truly believe so. So that's why I will make my product free. Plus, I can't agree more on your points: Gather as much feedback as you can. Improve your product. Build a loyal user base. Upon launch of v.1. offer your loyal user base your improved product at a discount (50% minimum). Make valuable big updates every 1 - 1.5 year. Make them paid, offer them at a discount (50% minimum). And I think this becomes even more true when you have a specific taste or philosophy behind your product. In that case, the goal is not to build something for everyone or compete the way big companies do by trying to capture the largest possible market. Instead, you gather your own kind of people — the users who truly value the way you think and build. If the product can’t be completely free, then I really admire models like Costco and IKEA. Their philosophy is to keep prices as low as possible so people naturally keep coming back to them for that specific need. If you can gather a large enough group of loyal users while still surviving sustainably, you can even thrive — like Costco has. But the key is commitment. You have to stick to that philosophy no matter what. Even when you have opportunities to raise prices for more profit, you choose not to, because long-term trust and value for users matter more. I think that’s probably the best answer for most of us. In fact, it may eventually become the only sustainable answer. With AI, people can copy products much faster than before, so high margins themselves become an opportunity for competitors. And consumers will also be able to use AI to compare products and figure out very quickly which app provides the best value for them. In that kind of world, long-term trust, fair pricing, and genuine value may matter more than trying to maximize profit from each user. Let’s see where things are in five years. Maybe my prediction will turn out to be right — or maybe not.
I've been building and pricing software and SaaS for 30 years and while I'm always learning (because the market constantly changes) there are some things I’ve figured out along the way. Before any of the considerations you cited, you need to decide if your app should even exist and if it should, then you need to decide if it’s something people will pay for, or if it should be open source - something that you can build a community around and perhaps figure out a commercial model later. For example, Obsidian. Both approaches - paid or open source - have pros and cons. Obsidian is an amazing piece of software but to most people, its real value is in having notes available across all their devices. Boom - Obsidian sync. Only nerds like me will set up their own sync server, so $4/month to have access to your notes on your desktop and mobile devices is a no-brainer. If you want an example of the challenges of pricing Mac software, see the kerfuffle over CoTypist pricing happening right now in this sub. CoTypist a commendable product. I've been using it in beta for a few weeks and find it useful. But it's a feature that should be baked into the OS and probably will be at some point, if Apple ever gets its proverbial sh*t together around AI. (People of my vintage understand when a Mac app becomes "Sherlocked" and this will happen to CoTypist.) By this measure, it should exist, if nothing else than to prove to Apple that it's something people want. But should it exist commercially? I'm not sure. It's a utility, not a full-on productivity app. The developer wants to charge $15/month for software that does not rely on cloud services, which is a stretch. People pay less than that for a Google One subscription which includes 2 TB of storage, an entire productivity suite, video conferencing, and some AI features. Granted, it's Google and they will have massive scale whereas CoTypist will not have anything near that type of scale. But people will still make the value comparison, as I just did, with both CoTypist and Obsidian. Having said that, I would happily purchase a perpetual license for CoTypist with a support tier, say, $25 with support for the current major version. (See Acorn.) I don't have to upgrade if the software still works well on my OS and my needs haven't changed, but if the developer continues to improve it and releases those improvements in the next major version, I could be enticed to pay for an upgrade license. (See anything from Rogue Amoeba.) There is no perfect answer but this type of analysis is critical. Thanks for letting me stand on my soap box. I'll get off now. 😉
Thanks so much for providing such practical and useful advice. This was what I expected before I post this question. I have been thinking about the Obsidian model. You made it very clear. Well, I think they may or may not designed that model. But it turned out to be very very powerful. It was the app that triggered me thinking about maybe that is the optimal model for some software category, not only notes but also some other software where you want things sync across all your devices and they provide cloud so normal user just need to hop on. And you probably noticed their extensions ecosystem. So if you can build an ecosystem around your product, that’s also very powerful. Well, all of those are not just you open source or you open apis and then people come, and trust you to build on top of your platform. I think you have to show everyone you are going to be able to last a long time and you are trustworthy. But this is a great topic for us to explore.
I guess you have to show people that your goodwill, vision and your power and determination to build something wonderful and long lasting, so that people would like to join you and follow you and then a community would be built around it gradually. We can see that in Obsidian, Notion, and Alfred. To do that you need to give a lot. And also when it comes to software, make the core a public service, would be a basic move.
The pricing for digital products feels weird nowadays. People casually accept $80 videogames and subscriptions for everything, yet a one-time $20 purchase for a standalone macOS app suddenly feels expensive. I think the price itself matters less than the context around it. Desktop software especially needs a demo version. A lot of apps are “dead on arrival” – you launch them once, immediately hit bugs or annoying UX decisions, and uninstall them five minutes later. But if the app is actually useful and enjoyable to use, paying for it usually doesn't feel like a problem anymore. Trust also matters much more than landing pages. Modern internet culture trained us to ignore flashy headlines and marketing copy. Recommendations from people you trust create far more value than ads or growth funnels ever could. And value itself is subjective. Some people care deeply about polished UI, animations, icons, and overall UX. Others just want a small utility that reliably does one thing well. So for indie macOS apps, pricing is rarely just about the number itself. It's about trust, discovery, reputation, and whether the software feels genuinely useful after you try it.
I think some of this depends on what your app is trying to accomplish. If you are simply adding nice quality of life features or something macOS is missing by default (like a per app volume adjuster) then yes you probably don’t want to go much above $10-15. Polish and support also factor into this as well
Yes, totally agree. But I won’t make those apps, as I worry I can’t survive an OS update.
Je suis passé par exactement cette réflexion récemment sur l'appli que nous dévelopons (Oriloq) , donc je partage du vécu plutôt que de la théorie. Sur l'éternel débat abonnement vs achat unique : la réticence que tu observes ici est réelle, mais elle dépend énormément du type d'outil. Pour un truc qui rend service ponctuellement, le lifetime gagne. Pour un outil que les gens ouvrent tous les jours et que tu dois maintenir activement (compatibilité macOS, nouvelles features), l'abonnement se défend, à condition d'avoir une vraie version gratuite utilisable pour ne pas braquer les gens. J'ai fini sur un modèle freemium avec abo, en assumant de perdre une partie du public anti-abo mais de financer la maintenance dans la durée. C'est un compromis, pas une vérité. Sur le prix lui-même, ton point 2 est le bon : value-based, pas cost-based. Et méfie-toi du "trop cher au-dessus de 10 $" que tu lis ici : ce sub est surtout rempli d'autres makers, pas de tes vrais clients. Leur tolérance au prix n'est pas représentative.
Thanks for reminding me that the majority of people here are makers. Even though I can’t verify that for sure, it’s definitely something I should keep in mind and think more carefully about. I agree that software pricing probably shouldn’t have a hard ceiling, as long as the price doesn’t exceed the value it provides or fall below the cost of sustaining it. Somewhere in between is where the balance has to be found. Of course, higher prices usually mean fewer users, but I think the important thing is simply to start somewhere and keep improving the software so the value grows massively over time. Sooner or later, the price and value should naturally become more balanced — or even better, become a high-value, low-price product. I think that’s probably the best path. And we should never underestimate the value and power of network effects, and it only comes from having a large user base, you can only get through always lower down the price!
few things that actually matter more than the headline number, from watching this play out across a bunch of mac indie launches: 1. lifetime vs subscription is a positioning decision, not a price decision. if your app's value is "i used it today" (utility, clipboard manager, calculator), lifetime wins because the user can mentally amortize. if it's "i open it once a week but when i need it, it earns its keep" (backup, screen recorder, AI workflow tool), subscription works because each use is high-value. picking the wrong model is more expensive than picking the wrong number. 2. the $9.99 → $29.99 → $49.99 ladder is real on macOS specifically because that's where the lifetime cap sits in r/macapps brain. once you cross ~$30 lifetime, expectations jump — people want migration tools, a real changelog, a working trial, an app icon someone actually designed. you don't have to cross it, but if you do, fund the polish to match. 3. launch a bit higher than you think. discounting down is easy and feels great to early customers. raising prices later makes existing buyers angry, no matter how nicely you frame it. i've watched several devs price at $14.99 → market told them it was worth $39 → they spent a year stuck between cohorts because grandfathering became a support nightmare. 4. for the lifetime crowd specifically: one line on the pricing page like "you keep this version forever; major versions are a separate purchase, year 1 free" de-risks $40+ lifetime massively. people aren't actually angry about paying for major upgrades — they're angry about being surprised by paying for major upgrades.
Great advices! They are very practical. It’s about managing user expectations and experiences. You always want to under promise and over delivery, not the other way around. Appreciating the tips to manage them well.
It depends on the app. If it's a utility app of some kind, ala Droppy for example, a small one time fee is acceptable. ~$15 is the absolute most I'll even consider paying though. If the app is providing some sort of ongoing service I'll consider a subscription. However, and I say this with all due respect to devs everywhere, "I occasionally provide a software update" is not deserving of a subscription. I almost pissed myself laughing at the dude here today that wanted us to pay $30 per year for our own google calendars. Fuck all the way off lmao
well, if you got same questions like me with your app pricing, you can mention about your app names and how to find them, so that if people need to know more, they can search it, give real feedbacks.
Question for some people here.. I recently launched a mac app for Chinese language learners and I think it's honestly one of the best apps in it's niche. I made it free because I wanted users to try it and get a lot of quick feedback. Does it usually burn good will to make a previously free app a one-time payment app? edit: you can see the launch post here if you have any thoughts. thanks.
I think you did great there. Free is great to start! And you may want to consider the windows version or Linux versions, just to serve way way more people, and if people already loved it, you may want to have something in the app to spread the word easily. And if you keen to get feedbacks, why not put a feedback form in the app to collect feedback, or simply an email, not all the people know how to give you feedback in the subreddit. Good luck! And keep improving it, one 1000 user love your product, is way more valuable than 1 million people kind of like it. Not to mention you may have 1 million love your product. Keep improving! For monetization, you should figure something out naturally as you grow. But my suggestion is don’t let you monetization harm your user growth as the biggest maybe 100 times bigger return comes from your user base not the 1/10 or even less people pay you for the functions. Think about if Google charge you 10 bucks to use Google search at the very beginning of their journey, then think about if it can still grow to such big company!
If there are no hosting costs, then there should never be a subscription.
I think if an app is native and dont do much cloud stuff then a 1 time purchase fee of $8 to $20 is sweet spot depending on the features. But if your app is linked to online services like providing sync or backup or calling APIs from 3rd parties where cloud costs can add up quickly a subscription model make more sense.