If you’re thinking about switching to the free+ model or promoting your app by giving it away for a short time, read on. A developer, who asked to remain anonymous, recently shared his experience with me. I’m glad he’s letting me share, as I think this could save you some pain.
Be careful
According to this developer’s experience, switching your app to free—something you would think would generate positive buzz—could have serious negative repercussions. Aside from the fact that free apps tend to get lower reviews, this developer saw an onslaught of negative reviews coming from disgruntled users who purchased the app in the few days prior to it going free. People were even updating their older reviews to complain about the sudden switch to free.
It seems silly. Come on folks, its 99 cents! Its ridiculous but we developers have to face the fact that some people feel cheated if they paid for something that someone else is now enjoying for free.
A solution
Fortunately, this particular developer found a workaround. The next time he updated his app to free, he announced the upcoming sale in the app description four days before the promotion. It worked. Major drop in sales for 4 days; no complaints about the app suddenly going free. Win.
This indicates that the complaints came primarily from users who had purchased the app within a few days of it going free.
Related: Dan Grigsby recently wrote a thoughtful piece on how lower prices tend to attract lower ratings. Free apps inevitably garner the worst ratings: Easy come, easy go; when they go, the iPhone asks them to rate. Seriously consider the price of going free.
Hi,
could you please check your grammar more carefully.
If your thinking.. — should be: If you're thinking OR If you are thinking.
Payed should be paid. Pay, paid, paid.
These are little things but you should master these anyhow.
Thanks
Pimppi: thanks for the corrections. I updated the post.
It's a good thought, and something I've read a lot about recently. But I wonder wouldn't the increased downloads and increased ratings (good or bad) brought on by moving your app to free, lead to better placement in the App Store and thus more sales when you bring your app back to paid? At some point it must work as a positive strategy. The difficult part is knowing when you've crossed that line where more ratings would improve your sales solely because of higher placement regardless of the strength of rating.
Of course, I'm basing this on the assumption the App Store factors in number of ratings into its sorting algorithm, but I believe that to be the case.
Ken: Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Apple counts free downloads if you switch back to paid (they used to but I think they changed after some apps took advantage of this).
By the way, I am certainly not discouraging anybody to try the free+ model. Its unchartered territory but I, for one, would like to hear from developers who have tried it. I am seriously considering using it for my upcoming app.
I think Jerols is right that moving to and back from free doesn't factor on your ratings within the paid listings. Or at least it shouldn't, and I suspect myself that this may have even never been the case (that you could game the app store this way).
However, there are other good reasons to do free limited time promotions such as if you have a social networking or crowd-sourcing app and you need critical mass for it to start working for the customers. Or if you just want to get a little word of mouth promotion…
There are legitimate reasons for doing limited time free promotions and it's a good idea to announce it to users prior in order to avoid backlash from those who may purchase in the days leading up and may return to rate and change a good or moderate review to bad.
Anon: good point.
In our latest podcast, we discussed our experiment in making our app free for a limited time. In short, it didn't work out in our favor and for most apps, I wouldn't recommend going this route. You can hear the full details in our podcast here: http://blog.weareuproar.com/podcast3