Is "Payment Required" a good label for your freemium app?

You're right, but the "does not function without payment" mark is likely to change the behavior of developers who sell "pig in a poke", not just kpay.

Hi Mappicus.

I fully agree with you.

It is already hard to get some revenues on our hard work.  WIth "Payment Required", most people will search for a fully free version with less functionality. So three labels would solve this  problem I think.

Kees 

I use the "buy me a beer" donation model, and it works well,  There's no stigma where people avoid my apps because they have to pay for full functionality, no hassles if someone doesn't like it and want's a refund, etc.

I think the lowest donation I've gotten (after currency conversion) was 37 cents us, but I also get ones that are more than what some others charge for apps (maybe a case of beer!).  It all works out.

I tried the buy me a beer model and concluded that people using my stuff don’t drink. 

Lots of favourable mentions and certainly some donations, but my two most popular and most heavily downloaded were also downloaded by the stingiest users. 

Going paid has not caused me any regrets and neither has it triggered any negative reactions. To date, I’ve had precisely two people questioning me making money out of this - and the most recent one ended with an amicable wish for a happy Christmas. 

I think “buy me a beer” can work for vast numbers (I think you’re in the hundreds of thousands, Jim?) but for anyone starting out it’s a recipe for disappointment. 

Also... it can be disingenuous. I know of one developer who bragged about how he’d leave bugs in deliberately as people often accompanied a bug fix request with a donation. 

I don’t do that kinda messing around. 

A simple payment model suits me because it’s clean, clear and unambiguous. 

Some depends on being a known quantity.  You've used apps from the same developer and were happy.  And yes, being visible in the product forum helps. The other thing is how quickly you respond when a user has a problem.

If you start with apps which need some kind of payment to be 100% functional, it's harder to get started.

As far as the paid model, if you look through the 6 years of posts here, you'll find a number of instances where people got bad reviews due to a payment model and the users weren't happy.  It wasn't clean, clear and unambiguous to some users

Maybe 5-6 years back a paid version of an app was published, and someone (not me) released a free version with the same functionality maybe two weeks later, as something pretty basic was a paid feature and the 2nd dev thought that was silly.

One version is still in the store and one is not.  Can you guess which is still there?

Yes, you need to offer something worthwhile to get paid for it. Preferably something that isn’t otherwise available. 

And then there are watchfaces... I guess that beauty and value are always in the eye and mind of the beholder. 

I don't see any Garmin users in this thread, like Travis or Brandon. Is Garmin aware of our discussion?

Kees

It is the holidays, and I'd guess a bunch of people have taken time off.

This isn't a new idea, as it was mentioned at the Developer Conference in October, along with new app categories being added to the store..

I forget which session(s) it was mentioned in, but here's a link to them all.   (there could be more in the Q&A parts, but those aren't on-line.)

forums.garmin.com/.../

Juggus said:

'Trial' is better word for apps which have a trail version for instance.

Not convinced. 

The vast majority of “trial” products are “trial with intent to purchase”. After the trial, user is locked out to a greater or lesser degree. Unless they intend to spend or are planning delete / reinstall for each usage (dependent on sophistication of the lock mechanism), there’s almost zero point them downloading a “trial” app.

The difference between paid and “pay to unlock more” is easier to defend. (Eg: The Freemium stuff discussed earlier that has usable functionality in perpetuity even without payment.) 

That said, the vast majority of my DF are “freemium” / “pay to unlock more”, but I’m still very happy to check “payment required”. I would prefer everyone to come to my fields with the desire to (or at least cognisance of the possibility that they might) spend money. That way they might look at what payment offers and consider it.