Cashculator 2 pricing

Disappointed to see that there is no upgrade pricing for existing customers. Whatever happened to customer loyalty?

Hi. I understand that this is disappointing but it is hard, technically, to do that when switching to the Mac App Store, especially taking into consideration that we had both direct customers (who bought it on our site) and customers from two different builds in the Mac App Store (some using the limited free version).

Cashculator 1 was released in 2009, and the majority of our customers are from these early years. I think that they received their money’s worth even without upgrade pricing. We also reduced the price of Cashculator 1 more than a year ago, in effect giving everyone who purchased within the last year a discount anyway.

I would say that from my point of view, running a small indie company, our biggest customer loyalty was to support Cashculator 1 through all these years when it didn’t have any meaningful income and we continued pouring time and money into building version 2 (we started version 2 many years ago) despite the lack of significant income from version 1.

Fundamentally, we can’t afford to make the software for free. The money from any sale goes directly into supporting future development of the applications.

Personally, Caschulator 1 came along at just the right time for me. I think I purchased it around the same time it launched and I’ve definitely derived value from it. It’s helped me stabilise my family’s cashflow, plan ahead for big purchases and life changing events, helped my buy my first home, move overseas and back again and so much more.

When you think about how many hours go into developing an app that abstracts the complexity of implementation from the user experience, and that those hours have to be financed prior to any revenue being generated from the app, and when you additionally factor in the ongoing maintenance costs of supporting an app throughout it’s lifecycle, I’m sure that arriving at a price the consumer will think is right is quite a difficult task.

I hope that Cashculator 2 takes off, and that others get the same value as I did.

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