I think that most armchair-businesspeople underestimate the costs of running a business and overestimate the number of paying customers. It is particularly ironic, because they both do not want to pay for software themselves, and also think that masses of other people do want to pay for software.

People tend to think that the costs of a software business are just the time of the single developer that writes the software. And they also calculate the cost of that time as what developers actually get as their salary. But this is not how you run a business, not by a long shot.

This gap in understanding has been widening recently, because of the completely unsustainable app store pricing.