When you’re considering creating a mobile application to make money with the growing mobile market, you may be wondering what the best price point is for your app, whether this is a game or a more serious endeavour. There are different pricing strategies you can use. In this blog post, I’m going to explore some of the main things you should consider regarding mobile app pricing.
Your first price point to consider for your mobile application might seem strange, as it involves giving this way for free. Yes, that means it’s not directly going to make any money. You’re not charging for this product. You may want to do this purely because you want to get people to download it. The more people who install this app on their device, the more visible the app will be in the different app stores. There’s nothing to stop you from increasing the price on this later but even in the short term you can look at secondary income measures your app, such as advertising or payments needed to unlock content.
A similar kind of strategy might not be to give this away for free but alternatively to release this at a very low price. On most app stores, the cheapest paid price you’re going to offer this for is $0.99. If you sell huge numbers of the app and it takes on a viral quality, you can still make a substantial amount of income from this low price strategy.
A final strategy is to charge a higher price. This could be $4.99, $9.99 and even more if you have an app that is particularly rare and sophisticated. For this pricing strategy, you’ll want to look at a niche release or something where people value the product enough to play for quality. Think of this as a similar strategy to high end Internet Marketing products, which might only sell a small number of products, but which can be more profitable overall than a lower priced alternative. The high price strategy may well work for you.
You do need to carefully consider the pricing strategy of your app because it’s quite hard to change it once you got it wrong. It may be possible to go for free app to a low price app, or to go from a low price app to free app, but it’s really hard to move that to a really high price bracket even if you add a lot of new features or dramatically change the product. Choose carefully now and then you’ll settle the app ready to be successful well into the future.