How much will I charge?

Deciding on how much to charge for me feels like a bit of a balancing act, which I suppose product pricing always is. My first product, my program builder app for strength athletes or enthusiasts, is somewhat unique in its functionality but it is not without a lot of competition. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of existing fitness apps on the app store, and many of them are simply free with ads, or entirely free for the simpler ones that the developer decided wasn’t worth charging people for. The competition is important here, because with there being so many free options, charging for the product up front may be detrimental to my applications success in the market. If I were to charge up front for the app, my initial thought is that the price would have to be very low, $0.99 perhaps. There are ways of producing income from the app without charging up front too of course, such as advertisements within the app, charging for removing the ads, or simply asking for donations from users who love the app which I have seen on a few occasions. I could also have a free version with additional functionality behind a paywall, and users can pay to access the features. The issue I have with most of these is that I feel the experience in the app is somewhat tarnished. So how can I charge up front without making it as cheap as possible? Well, there are several productivity apps that despite relatively simple functionality manage to be very popular while charging a shocking amount for the app up front, and some of them have absolutely staggering success even when there are free alternatives available. A great example of this is the "Things 3" app, which costs $9.99 and is essentially just a to-do list app. Yet it has 14,000 reviews, and surely a much higher download count. The key to this, I believe, is the exceptional quality of apps like "Things 3". They are beautiful with a clean and simple design, great user interface and layout, while also providing the best functionality that users actually care about. This is where I want to be. Too many of the apps I would compete with, in my opinion, add excessive “fluff” that in the end does not make the app any better. All it does is make the screenshots in the app store look nice. With all of this in mind, I would like to charge for my app up front, and save users from built in ads or restricted functionality. $4.99 to download would be my ideal pricing I think, and quite reasonable so long as I continue to improve and maintain the app over time and make sure the user experience remains great.

Right after writing and posting the above post, I continued listening to a new podcast I found on Swift development (Swift is the language of choice for iOS applications), and it was an interesting coincidence that they were talking about how developers can make the highest quality apps that they can, and talked about different pricing models. They brought up an excellent point which was that you shouldn't undervalue an app and depend on higher volumes of downloads to generate income. The reason for this is that especially when an app focuses on a niche, the volume will never be there. Much better to focus on quality and simply charge what the app is really worth to the target audience. They also mentioned the trend toward subscription based models, which does seem appealing for the constant revenue but does not seem fitting for this particular category of app.