Bundle of Upgrades?
2006-12-14 03:25PM PST/Home
There's a tempest over the current MacHeist bundle that started with Gus Mueller's post Week of the Independent Mac Developer who is insulted that they're calling it the week of the independent Mac developer when he feels the Mac developer is getting screwed.
I'm certain the developers who are participating in the bundle know what they are getting into, and have good reasons for doing so. But for MacHeist to call it "The Week of the Independent Mac Developer" and to practically give away the software... well, that's just a fucking insult to me and all the other hard working developers out there.
The coverage by and large agrees with him. Daring Fireball's Iniquities of the Selfish feels that 10 to 15% is the standard, acceptable cut.
If sales reach the level to unlock TextMate, MacHeist will keep more than 70 percent of the total profit, and the average individual developer will get less than 3 percent. I repeat: 70 percent of the profit would go to the MacHeist team - almost 25 times more money than the average profit of a developer in the bundle, and more than double the profit of all 10 developers combined.ThinkingMac Blog runs the the numbers in The Economics of MacHeist and comes to the conclusion that the best you're going to get out of it is some PR.
So in conclusion ... the only real value you get is in marketing exposure - unless your app really is only worth $4 per sale.
What I found interesting, and this is by no means definitive, is that several of the applications in the bundle appear to be roughly in the same place in terms of development cycle. A few quick Yahoo! searches on the apps reveals, many shipped right around the same time, mid to late 2004. And many are pretty deep into their current major release.
Delicious Library, version 1.0 shipped 4th quarter 2004 (version 1.0.7 shipped Dec 29, 2004), current version 1.6.4.
FotoMagico, version 1.0 shipped September 30th, 2004 current version 1.8.1.
Unsanity ShapeShifter version 2.0 shipped October 26th, 2004 current version 2.4.
RapidWeaver, version 1.0 shipped June 2004 current version 3.5.1.
Delicious Library and FotoMagico have been talking publicly about their upcoming 2.0 version. RapidWeaver is perhaps the most direct in their post Have a spoonful of hate, there's plenty to go around.
We also have thousands of potential new users. While a lot of people won't have purchased the bundle specifically for RapidWeaver they'll probably give it a whirl and hopefully love it. So when RapidWeaver 4 ships, they may just be tempted to pay for an upgrade. It's a win-win-win situation
This has to be a big part of their motivation. Applications that have been out for quite a while and are nearing a major upgrade; I'm betting most are thinking they've reached all the users they could possibly have reached with their current version. For these indie software developers, anybody MacHeist reaches is someone that wouldn't have bought this version of the software, period.
Which is pretty much what Wil Shipley said in the recent arstechnica interview.
I think events like this get a lot of publicity, so they bring in new customers that I wouldn't reach on my own. So I'm not really sabotaging my sales; I'm supplementing them.
...some people who aren't interested in Delicious Library right now will buy the bundle for the other applications, and then start using Delicious Library and discover they love it, and later upgrade to Delicious Library 2. The biggest source of revenue for a software developer is upgrade revenue, so I don't mind getting new customers at a discount if I'm pretty sure they'll fall in love with my app and pay for upgrades later. And if people use it and don't fall in love with it; well, that didn't really hurt my any, did it?
Back to Gus for a second.
Voodoo Pad 1.1, Released October 12, 2003 (couldn't find the 1.0 version release date). Version 3.0 released July 5, 2006. Current version 3.1.2.
Note where Voodoo pad is in its development cycle. Not quite the same place, version 3 is 5 months old, and version 4 is most likely many months away. I have to wonder what Gus would have said to the MacHeist folks had they run this promotion around this time last year? Or a bit closer to July?