[Windows Phone 7 General] nokola:
Message from developer

Hi! I'm the developer :)

I've been a long time XDA reader, but never commented, until now.

You're right, the 6 time price increase is insane at the moment :)

I agree I'm not a good businessman (yet), and I welcome all feedback. It's great to see that people care :)

My dream for Fantasia is to be not just a painting app, but THE painting app (it's very far from that, yet), which offers a wow experience in a variety of painting scenarios :) I have lots of work to do.

Here's the logic behind the temporary increase: I really want to offer some new features in Fantasia that will heavily rely on network.

I estimated that a user could easily use 1MB/day when they use my new (secret, and may never see the light of day) feature. If we scale this to say, 100000 users (which is not my current count, but just take it as example), this means 97 GB/day, or 2.8TB of bandwidth per month! This is quite a sum to pay. Remember that it won't be a cheap host - the servers and data will have to be replicated worldwide, if I want it to be fast and silky-smooth from every country :) And a user pays for it once, but I'll keep incurring a monthy cost.

There were 3 options that came to my mind:

1. release a new app (e.g. Fantasia Painter Pro), that comes with premium features, and be more expensive

2. wait and see if/how Windows Phone 7 supports in-app purchases (e.g. offering a "Pro" package in the existing app)

3. Raise the price

Option 1: this will mean that I have to take a heavy hit on development, support and update. Each extra app adds about a week for every update release for me (I'm a hobby developer working in the evenings)

Option 2: don't like to wait

Option 3: I decide to raise the price for 2 days and see the feedback. I calculated that $6 would be about the right price to pay for the extra bandwidth, long term.

This seemed viable, I decided to "go for it". Since the market is still young (smaller) I figured it's better to experiment now than "take a hit" later. Plus I did receive significant amount of feedback that $0.99 looks "cheap" and I should price it more. A good amount of people told me they'd easily pay between $6 and $10 for the app. Those were all people who used the app. I expected new customers to either completely ditch the app due to higher-than-typical price or to try the free trial since, it was a $6 top rated app (I'd try that, just out of curiosity to see what it has to offer at this price). And Fantasia Painter Free is a good driving source for the paid app, so it helps lower the risk (I hope).

So I did price it more on Friday. The result was, mixed feedback, in the 2 opposite parts of the scale ("no good" and "it's great amazing, etc" 5 stars). The app started very slowly going down in purchases. Then Microsoft featured it yesterday (first page on Zune apps and on phone when you open Marketplace). This was great, and completely unexpected. Even though I work for Microsoft, I'm treated the same as any external customer when it comes to marketplace (this is the way it should be IMO) Now I had a $6 app, that everyone could see, risking significant number of low ratings that would take a while to recover. I decided to make the price $1.99 instead, after consulting with number of people. Then I happened to find this post.

So, this was the experiment. I'm still not sure what to take from it and your opinion is very welcome!

For now, I'll just keep the data on the backburner and focus on improving the app without the need for extra network bandwidth.

Few other topic:

> Why is their an international premium, IDK, but there is. Is this different on other OS?

the marketplace price per country is determined automatically: I just set the U.S. price and the other boxes are filled in for me. I'm not sure if the price in different countries is exactly equivalent to the US price. When the price is changed for the US, it's changed everywhere as well. It's a good question.

> Since the price is already over its utilities,the sales might be dropped to 20 or maybe 30...

I was thinking the same for some time, but it's not really the case. My app is getting a steady # of downloads per day (yay!). Probably that means the market is growing at a healthy rate!

Disclosure: I do work for Microsoft, but Fantasia is my hobby project 100% outside of work. It is not (and I'd not like it to be) connected with Microsoft in any way in order to be able to do "my thing".

Thanks for reading this looooong post. I wanted to explain the pricing, at least for Fantasia and get some feedback, if possible.