Shooting enthusiasts are willing to pay money for software. Brian Plexico once sold several thousand dollars worth of a program written in a week, which just recorded scores for skeet shooting. One of the keys was ease of use -- again, NOT a command line.
http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/03/06/conception-to-sa...
Talk with the old lady and put together a grand to take out an ad in Soldier of Fortune, then slap a big fat "Please see our ad in Soldier of Fortune" on your website.
SoF is such a highly coveted niche publication, the mention of its name is more profitable than the revenue generated from ads on it. "As Seen In Soldier of Fortune" has a nice ring to it, rhymes with "cha ching".
Again, Get it DONE!
Get Dev-Cpp; click Tools -> Check for Updates -> [scroll around to find a recent FLTK devpak -> Select -> Download.
Restart FLTK and New -> Project -> GUI -> FLTK.
Get it done!
Downside: Less of a percentage as your take. Upside: You're not hosting the store.
Also, I agree with others that trying to sell a CLI version will probably go nowhere. In fact, it may stifle adoption after you switch to the GUI version (since prospective users might think "Oh, that's that terminal program, right? Yuck!").
Amen on the GUI comments. Other than that, how would the program go as a value-add to manufacturers of specific supplies and/or equipment? If it helps increase sales and/or help people achieve increased accuracy and/or grouping then maybe some such suppliers might be prepared to have you brand the program for them to sell at gun shops.
Seriously. Whatever number you're thinking of, it is too low. Think of a number that makes you wince. That number is too low, too.
Many people here will suggest you charge like $5 or $10. These people are unwilling to buy your application at any price. They are not your customers. Their opinion on your price is irrelevant. (I mean this in the nicest possible way, guys.)
Charge for value. It isn't a "little" app or a "simple" app. Your customers are not programmers and do not know how many LOC it was (or, on the other extreme, how much loving care you put into it). They only see the value delivered to them. Price appropriate to the value.
People pay more money than you will ask, far more, for things which matter far less to them. Always remember that!
Charge more.
If someone is going to open their wallet and bother to enter a credit card number on your site, $10 is the same as $25. If your product saves someone a few hours of effort, $25 is a trivial amount of money to buy that time -- you will have a sale.
Don't compete on price -- compete on provided value. Make your app the best way to resolve 'Task X' and people will buy it.
Ignore those people who say you're too expensive. If they're wincing about $25 you really do not want them as a customer. Back when I priced software to be competitive 'on price', I attracted people who were looking for the cheapest solution and those people are, by far, the biggest pain in the tail for support that you will ever run into.
I understand that you meant that it's easy to underprice the app, but as a generic pricing guideline this advice is wrong.
Not considering running operational costs, the price should maximize (price x sales) figure, i.e. the revenue. It's true that in some cases doubling the price cuts the number of customers in less than a half, in which case the the "charge more" advice stands. But in other cases charging half of the current price may easily quadruple your paying userbase.
Finding the right price can be done only through trying different prices. At some point Amazon was giving random discounts to their users and trying to pinpoint the ideal price for the item. It didn't last long, of course, as people started gaming them, but it just goes on to show that the price validation is a big deal.
Also keep in mind if you start with $200, see zero sales and then start gradually reducing it to $20, then you basically shoot your own credibility as a merchant as the $200 -> $20 drop makes you look greedy, detached from the reality and ultimately incompetent.
In the end it all very much depends on the application and the target customer base.
I think you will find in the typically B2C sales cycle -- which is a term that makes me laugh, since it typically fits inside a browser session -- customers do not have access to the contents of your lunchbox from last Tuesday or your pricing strategy from yesterday. The only thing they see is your price, today. This is one reason that nearly everyone who starts at $200 and goes to $20 fails -- not because they "lose credibility" (no one saw the $200 price -- really, no one, the no sales problem in software is almost always caused by the marketing strategy "Put up a website and pray someone discovers it") but because charging $20 for applications communicates that the value provided by them is negligible.
(Relatedly: your competitors' pricing does not matter because your customers will probably never see it.)
Are you suggesting that the other direction is preferable? I would think that it would be worse to keep jacking up the price.
What others haven't mentioned yet is that this also gives you an excellent user base for any future products you decide to create and release. Would you want to market your next product to an existing customer base of a bunch of cheapos, or people who have prequalified themselves as individuals whose time is worth serious money and are willing to pay up for good quality fixes to their problems?
Try before you buy is the time honoured way of proving utility and value but that adds the cost of adding security to the app. Perhaps an unconditional money back guarantee?
I know of one who made a similar app for airgun users that is free but has nag screens but most everyone I know on the airgun forums have shot over (excuse the pun) the small fee to get rid of them out of gratitude for the app, which we all have found quite useful.
Expecting people to pay anything over $5 for a command line tool is unrealistic. And if it is priced at $5, then it won't sell because $5 is just not worth a hassle of paying for the users. Unless, of course, there is a streamlined purchasing mechanism. One click checkout that pre-fills the credit card info and such, but again that's not an option.
I would strongly suggest creating a GUI version of the tool and then it may have a chance of selling at $10 to $20 range .. though again .. know thy customers - people who make the ammunition at home typically do so because it cuts their costs. This means that you will need to somehow convince these cheap bastards that your app is worth paying for, and it's not an easy thing to do.
I'd also suggest setting up a free web version but under a completely different name and domain. Slap on some relevant ads (Adsense, ebay, etc).
You're note going to destroy your market either way. You're not making anything right now, so experiment!
In my startup one of the mistakes we made early was pricing things too low.
