It was just a couple of weeks ago that Patrick wrote that dBelement’s application suite had come out of beta and now required a subscription.
Patrick gave a fair assessment of the suite writing,
They all seem decent enough web apps, and I ‘ve enjoyed MindDojo quite a bit (though it does not seem to have been refreshed in quite a while) – but I wouldn ‘t rate any of them as outstanding, or able to match up to native apps that provide the same function… There may well be a great market for these – but personally I can ‘t see paying out nearly $50 over the course of a year for a set of apps that will likely not stand up well against full-blown local apps that will appear in the App Store over coming months.
As a result of Patrick’s post I opened an account and took a five day subscription. I tried out each of the apps that are part of the suite, which includes Reader, MindDojo, Stripr, cityRUNNR and Noter. That was on a Sunday. The following day Patrick shared his assessment during our JustAnotheriPhoneChat web-cast. He was once again fair and even-handed. When I chimed in I was less so, commenting that Patrick’s post had prompted me to sign up for a 5 day trial but one day was more than enough. Thanks but no thanks.
Now I would not attribute all of it to Patrick’s post but late last night I received an email from dBelement…
Among other things the email noted-
Effective immediately all of our applications are available free of charge.The free versions of each application will contain ads and will be limited in features.The extended features of each application can be purchased…
I think this is a good call (perhaps the ONLY call) for them to make. It prompt me to go back and try MindDojo again and this time I kind of liked it. However I still have no use for the rest of the suite. In my opinion "Free" is the only reasonable price.
What stands out to me here though isn’t dBelement’s rapid change in pricing structure per se. Rather it is the fact that I suspect we will be seeing quite a lot of this. As the iPhone web app market approaches its year anniversary and resident applications roll out over the next few months…
…prices will be set…
…the market will speak…
…prices will be adjusted in kind.
The iPhone application market is brand new. (Heck, for resident applications it isn’t even NEW yet.) While the pricing structure for software and web-services for other platforms MIGHT give us some sense of what the market will accept it doesn’t ensure it. Not by a long shot.
The next few months promise to be interesting. Not only will we see WHAT applications are released, but we will see what the initial pricing looks like, as well.
We won’t really know what pricing the market will embrace until months, if not a year or more, later.
One thing is for sure, though– dBelement may be the first to quickly change the price of their iPhone applications but they won’t be the last. Not by a long shot.
Tags: iPhone, iPhone web apps, iPhone software
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