The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades
Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).
Update (2012-04-16): John Siracusa discusses this on Hypercritical #63. I found it interesting that in all the discussion of how one could lower prices and make it up in volume, no one mentioned the cost of providing ongoing technical support for those users. If you are not on a hockey stick growth curve, an increasing percentage of your customers will be non-paying, and yet they will still need just as much support.
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[...] anything goes on sale. I’m not sure whether this is a marketing tactic or a new attempt at Wil Shipley’s Gordian Knot of how (post–Mac App Store) to offer existing customers upgrading pricing without losing [...]
[...] is good news, although I still think the App Store needs paid upgrades. One of the strange things about the “hack” is that the store will notify users about [...]
