Free vs paid apps

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video let's talk about the pricing for a mobile app this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy well guess what for some reason people on mobile apps hate to pay something like $0.99 anywhere else almost any product that's the best thing that can happen is a 99-cent price and people love that price it's the little it's the smallest price but whenever they see that the price in the mobile app stores they're like oh my god they're trying to rip me off I am NOT getting taken for this ride this is a scam or something like that right so people have this averse reaction of paying on mobile in the app stores either on Google Play or on in the Apple App Store.

So we have to work with that that's the problem with the market and also most apps are free and actually most of the most lucrative apps are free because most of the time apps grow by being free and then they monetize from the inside that's the number one strategy grow by being free and then once people are using your app sell or promote something else to them and that will monetize better than getting people to pay upfront okay now the problem with the pricing is 99 cents or $1.99 even though people hate paying that that's still considered cheap but as soon as you start getting into $2.99 399 $4.99 and higher even though in the real world that's still really cheap it's like literally nothing less than a cup of tea or coffee whatever then only in the app stores people start really considered that's like a decision for a lot of people and that's a bad place to be if you're a business and it's an even worse place to be because you don't get to keep all that money you get to keep only 70% so the pricing is tricky here so the way to make money is not to get a lot of new people to buy stuff for 99 cents or $1.99 it's good if they do it is good if they - but the real gold is in the people who are already able to open up their wallet it's an afterthought for them to spend that you know there there are people who just realized okay $2.99 even $5 it's nothing and those people they'll subscribe you can sell them consumables so the scripts subscriptions are good.

If you have regular content something something happens where you get value long-term so if a person uses your app long term then subscriptions for different features make sense and when you're planning your app you have to make sure that the app you're planning has long term use it isn't just some app that people use for a little bit and throw away if you create long term use you'll create subscriptions on the other hand of subscriptions the problem with them is that some people know like oh I'll use the subscription this month but next month I'll forget about it and I won't use it and I'll waste my money so for that reason people don't always subscribe they don't love subscribing to things so the reverse of that all right what's called consumables consumables are things you can buy consume and then have to buy again so like points in the game this is a very popular paradigm you might have played these games where like it's really hard at some point and get becomes really hard to be the level and the only way to be that level is to buy some extra points and then you get those extra points and you for maybe for $0.99 and then you beat that level guess what happens in the next level it's even harder so you need to buy more points again that's $0.99 next level it's even harder so you buy again and again and again and again and again and then a lot of these games on the in the App Store's they have unlimited levels for a reason because there are some people they're called whales those people just buy again and again and again and again and they are the majority of the revenue where a lot of reasonable people don't buy or maybe buy once or twice but then there's some people who buy an extraordinary amount and these apps Bank on those people so that's what you want to do and of course if you can sell something from a one-time shot that's expensive that also works for example I used to sell my business coaching from my apps that I made and business coaching is more lucrative than 199 or $2.99 item right it's it's way more lucrative by orders of magnitude so you can sell something expensive to your super users keep in mind only your super users will be the one spending money.

Okay so before you can dream about making a lot of money from the apps you have to make sure that a lot of people love your app they really gotta love it they really gotta get long-term use out of it ideally the app would integrate with their daily life they would help it would help them with something they regularly do there are other ways to make money from ads that are not directly selling to them so they're outside of the scope of this course because the scope of this course is pricing and I've already covered pricing for absent pricing for you know how to have a maximize your pricing with subscriptions and consumables the other things I'll say is other ways to monetize apps are ads which do not monetize particularly well affiliate selling affiliate products which is also that does not monetize that well because what magnetize is better is selling your own products since when you sell your own products you keep more of the revenue so it's almost I have it listed in reverse order ads making the least money I feel it are at the middle and selling your products for services make more so this is essentially how to make money on apps these are some of the most popular strategies and it's only a matter of for you getting enough downloads and enough people seeing your offers and having a high conversion rate of sales of course and then this is the path to make your app highly money monetizable.