just some things to think about
Published on September 26, 2005 By DesignCaddy In DesktopGadgets
while things here are still fresh i wanted to give my two cents about the pricing of widgets. ( I'm speaking to the new developers, not to masters like Martin who already have an understanding of price versus quality. ) What's an acceptable price; how do you set a price the community will find acceptable (keeping in mind that they have the opportunity, if they own dx or another platform, to download widgets for free elsewhere)? What should i sell?

Where i think i'm qualified to make an opinion at the least is, being an independant buisness owner, a self employed designer, and someone who works with contracted developers frequently - i've had some insight into how they price for their time and talent.

Things to keep in mind:

1. supply and demand: Don't set a steep price for something where there exists a slew of other gadgets doing the same thing.

2. price vs value: Walmart versus Sears. Judge from your competition; use the masters as your models. if yours is more functional or is of better quality, you can set a higher value. If it's not - be fair to those who will see it because they may take a lower price for the lower quality based on their taste. i think the aim of this place is to sell unique gadgets, or gadgets that are simply above and beyond in development and function. That should be where your bar is set.

3. you are a buisness owner: you are releasing into the world an application. This is a stand alone program you have put sweat and tears into. You want to include a license agreement to prevent tampering. You'll want to avoid making a series of gadgets that are all very similar or have minor updates to each other all available for seperate sale. If someone buys a fancy clock from you, and you update it to include a fix or bonus feature, will you upload it as a seperate, priced gadget or give them the new download by updating the upload itself so they can keep downloading all concurrent versions? Be fair to people who download your stuff. Think 'Version #' or 'available for seperate download'.


I - an overall price model to consider

You spent how many hours developing the application? How much would you have charged a client hourly to develop it? Devide this by the demand: you are providing something to the masses instead of selling your creation to one person ( if you expect many people to download it you can set a price which will earn you, over several downloads, what you would have charged a client ).

As an example, a fair model might be: you spent 15 hours developing a time zone gadget. If you were an ameuture you'll give yourself 8$ an hour. 15*8=120. 120$? not bad. will 100 people download it? 120/100 = 1.20$. For a buck 20, i'd certainly buy your gadget.

II Accounting for your talent

what if it were more advanced, like an outlook calendar tie-in gadget? you are no ameature, you're a trained developer and this application is really wild. you've spent 20 hours on development, and you would charge 15$ an hour for development. 20*15=300 . that's a 300$ app. Let's go with 100 downloads again. that's 3$ a gadget.

II Residual income

well, Mick, i think my sweat and tears are worth more than 300$ for an application.

Now lets consider residual income - the glory of this website that EVERY ONE OF YOU SHOULD BE EXCITED ABOUT. your downloads won't stop at 100. How many downloads could you rack up over a month? another 100? 200? how about after 6 months? I often find and use windowblinds skins from 2002. When Essorant created Jinx, if he was charging for it, 3 years later he'd still be earning money from me. You have the opportunity to have cascading income through this website. If i sold my calendar tie-in for 6 months at 100 downloads a month, that's 1,800$ !! for only 600 downloads!

so TREAT THIS PLACE WITH RESPECT! ( and, don't forget that depending on what country you're in, a certain level of income within a certain period of time subjects you to income tax and selling apps on a website is no exclusion ).

i hope this helps. By all means if stardock has their own model of recomended pricing please censor the post as required.

Comments
on Sep 26, 2005
What you forgot to include in your calculation is that Stardock takes half the money after customary charges. So if you sold your app for $1.20 you'd get $0.60. That is excluding the customary charges. I have found no indication of how much these are. Something that would be nice to see.
on Sep 29, 2005
yes. i did forget to mention that important tidbit
on Oct 04, 2005
So what's your thoughts on that then? I'm quite curious of how much these customary charges are...
on Oct 05, 2005
I'm also awaiting feedback on this. Personally I'd be happier if the royalties period were shorter too. As it stands it could take 6 months for a developer to see any revenue from gadgets (wait until end of quarter + 90 days).

Re payment, I think pricing against the competition is key. DeskNotes is competitively priced at the moment against the competition, but I'm adding functionality, and when that is released the price will rise accordingly. At $4.95, this gadget is never going to be economically viable relative to the effort I've put into it, but if the price and popularity rise then this may change.

When it comes down to it, you can only do so much for the love of it. If it takes a lot of time, and makes no money, you cannot justify continuong development.
on Oct 05, 2005
I agree with Martin.. 1/2 the profit gone off the top, then who knows what the "other" fees are going to end up being, isnt 1/2 the money for supling the bandwidth/hosting for my 500k gadget? If i sell 10 gadgets at $5.00 thats $25 for hosting, i can get one hell of a host for $25/mo. More then enough to host 10 downloads of my 500k gadget.

6 months to be paid is REALLY excessive as well. I dont know of any place that has this kind of hold on money they are getting simply for hosting my work.

Im thinking that my own site is looking a LOT better for selling my work.

Its not just the money, time, issues, its the being ignored by the people running the site thats not right.

If you make your suppliers upset, you wont have a product to supply!!
on Oct 05, 2005
I want to make it clear that the concept is great - i.e. I personally don't want the hassle of taking payments online and undoubtedly Stardock marketing is a significant benefit to us developers. There are just a few teething problems which it would be good to address sooner rather than later.
on Oct 07, 2005
Sorry, i've not been able to reply/edit or anything to this topic.. havingsome trouble using these forums.from Opera and explorer.

Clarification on these fees would be paramount.. qouthe High Fidelity:
Cusak: " I want to put out your record. We split all profits down the middle, after i recoup exdpenses"
Kid: "You're going to recoup a big !%!@# mercades is what you're gonna do."
Cusak: "We're not there yet, Justin.."

Without knowing these fees you are in an unknown about your true pricing and thus your profits. I really can't shed any light on this i don't work for stardock or know what's up their sleeves.. im suprised Martin doesn't know. In my franchise, im paid monthly relative to that months sales. However im required to have at the least a certain level of volume to get that check.. that is the same system used here. The model is fair and i think when the site really gets underway and has traffic towards something like wincustomize, you see how much it adds up and how quickly. It will take time however for the traffic to come in. I hope for stardocks sake the whole system is automated and wired to the bank. Since things are so new i'm confident things will be clarified in good time.
on Oct 10, 2005

DC: I don't know on the grounds that don't currently do much work specifically for Stardock - the [Stardock] tag probably relates more to my martin@stardock.com email address than anything else.


I'm sure something will work out, I just hope that my bank doesn't charge me too much for cashing US dollars! Exchange rates and bank charges are going to further diminish any returns I make.

on Nov 14, 2005
So, anyone found otu how much these customary charges are?
on Nov 14, 2005
Like it says:
"These charges could include, but are not limited to: credit card processing fees, bandwidth, store fees, etc."

I doubt they'd amount to much, considering the volume of business Stardock does with credit cards, but it would be nice to know exactly how much it was. My guess is that customary charges won't actually be more than credit card fees unless it starts getting sold in (offline) stores, or bandwidth gets vastly more expensive than it is today.

Of course, if you do a 100Mb gadget, that could be an issue . . . but then you should be charging more fot that kind of content, anyway!
on Nov 26, 2005

One thing I've been noticing in submissions are people asking for money for things that are readily available for free as widgets. 

You can't put a few hours into something and expect others to pay for it.  The gadgets Stardock makes, like Aquarium Desktop 2 and Natural Desktop took a LOT of effort to make and they're only $10.

Someone making a clock or some pretty thingy that they whipped up over a weekend is not likely to be able to justify being charged for.