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Originally Posted by kathrynhr
A dash of perspective on the "overpriced" software comments...
I've been writing software professionally for 14 years. In the last 4 or 5, we as an industry are getting bashed left and right by people who are convinced that - irrespective of how many hours we spend coding, testing, debugging and polishing something - because it's software, it should be either dirt cheap or free. Some people are making free software, and everyone else downloads it for free over KaZaa... why can't we just make all software free? (And while we're at it, can we all hold hands and sing Kum-bay-yah???)
Yes, some people philanthropically create free software products. My hat is off to them; they must either be coding in their free time or working for a non-profit. That doesn't mean the rest of us are greedy for wanting to get paid for our work. My time is worth money just like every other professional's time. If I do development work for someone else I expect to be compensated for my time and effort.
Yes, I sometimes see software and think it's overpriced. I've seen utilities that cause a light on a device to blink or not blink. Experience tells me that, for an experienced programmer, such a feature is - at most - 5 lines of code and a 10 second test. 2 minutes tops. $10 for that 2 minutes is overpriced for me. For someone who really wants that light to blink, maybe that's fair.
Creating a good word processor with all the trimmings, on the other hand, would take hundreds of hours of work. Why shouldn't a developer charge more for that? $50 for mobile software makes a lot of people cringe, but to me that's by far the fairer price of these two examples because as a developer, I know what went into creating that product... and I believe people deserve fair compensation for their efforts.
Most developers charge extremely fair prices for their work, both in terms of product quality and the time they spent. Truly. The public keeps us honest; no one except the really big guys can get away with outrageous prices, especially given the proliferation of good-quality freeware. In all honesty, most devs who write these mobile apps are giving away more in terms of their own time and energy than they can ever possibly recoup financially. By and large, they're doing it just for the love.
$0.02.
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I'm a hardware and software developer, and although i agree with some of your coments, others are a little stretched.
Firstly, alot of code these days is made with components that are re-used over and over. Its unfair for you to expect people to pay the complete development price for those modules every time you use them in some software.
Secondly, the complexity of a device is roughly directly related to its price. A less complex device is likely to only be able to run fairly un-complex software. That means the more expensive a device, the more complicated software it could run, and the more the software could cost.
That said, the maximum price for software should in general be a certain % of the cost of the device. There simply isn't any justification to price software at prices sometimes more than the cost of the device itself.
Thirdly, yes everyone's time is worth something, and usually free products are unsustainable. However that doesn't mean that you should expect to get what you think your time is worth! Sometimes you will - if your software is good, other times you won't.
To be blunt, the real reason software is overpriced these days has nothing to do with the human hours put into it. Face it, how often do you hear people complain about very well written, very complicated but expensive software?
Software is overpriced for 2 reasons:
1) Simply because you think you can get away with it - for example all the BB software aimed at bunsines. You know full well a company can't download an illegal copy of it, so if they want that functionality they need to pay your price for it, whatever that may be. This works for a while until competition arives and forces you to price more fairly... leading to point 2..
2) You feel that so many people are pirating your software, or that you're simply not selling enough copies because its just not good enough - and you feel the compensate you for the time you put in, you're going to put the price up. This is just a false economy as no one will ever come back to you to buy anything in the future if the software isn't worth what you charge.
I've heard software developers preach this all the time, but face it, its just like any other industry - deal with it and set your prices fairly, or you won't survive very long.