I need your help deciding how to monetize my apps
22 May 2011Recently, my download counters ticked past the 1 million mark. I don’t count all the mirror sites, magazine CD subscriptions or even some of the obvious copies of my work (yes, I know who you are). Donations on the other hand are far and few between. A good month lands me a whole $20.
Apps like tweetz require a fair bit of maintenance. Twitter has been quite the moving target, first changing over to OAuth, then changing their ID schema and most recently HTTPS. It’s a lot of work. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it and really like hearing how my apps help people out.
On the other hand, given the numbers, it’s apparent, I’m leaving quite a bit of money on the table and that strikes me as, well, silly. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t an “App Store” for desktops because then the decision would be easy.
I really like the idea of something like 99 cents per app but without an infrastructure to manage it, the burden of tracking stuff is not cost effective. Thoughts?