I've already seen a number of apps in the Mac App Store that take this exact approach.

Two examples off the top of my head:

Textual, an IRC client [1, 2]

Blink, a SIP client [3, 4]...this is pretty difficult to compile, though...

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[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textual/id403012667

[2] https://github.com/Codeux/Textual

[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink-lite/id431473881

[4] http://icanblink.com/download.phtml

Cyberduck, an FTP client, takes a similar (though easier) approach. You can buy it on the Mac App Store for $23.99 [0], get precompiled binaries for free on their website [1], or grab the source yourself [2].

[0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyberduck/id409222199 [1]: http://cyberduck.ch [2]: https://trac.cyberduck.ch/browser

Do you have any data / references to support this?

Not sure why he/she deleted their post, but for an excellent in-depth analysis of App Store pricing I thoroughly recommend Michael Jurewitz' 5 part blog post "Understanding App Store Pricing"

http://jury.me/blog/2013/3/31/understanding-app-store-pricin... http://jury.me/blog/2013/3/31/understanding-app-store-pricin... http://jury.me/blog/2013/3/31/understanding-app-store-pricin... http://jury.me/blog/2013/3/31/understanding-app-store-pricin... http://jury.me/blog/2013/4/1/understanding-app-store-pricing...

Theres a bit of Economics 101, and some very well explained real world data on app pricing. Essentially Michael's advice boils down to: try doubling your price. If you lose less than half your sales, you're now making more money than you were before.

I wish I could pay for Blink on Windows, because it's my main SIP client. Windows definitely doesn't get the attention that Mac OS does, but the client is the best one I've found. (I really grew to hate Bria/X-Lite.)

I never thought about it like that. I bought Textual because I wanted to support the developers.

The benefit of it being open-source was that I could try it, use it, and hack it, before deciding they'd done a damn good job.

This can't really work on the long run / at scale, ya know... Someday someone will make a script that does the equivalent of the above, then somebody will make an alternative app-store GUI that leverages that script to get anything that's open-source for free. And you can't really sell as SaaS <$10 "apps" - so in the end you have two options: (a) classic closed source and (b) pay for subscription / user account (ok, there are the adds/in-app-purchases financed ones and they could profit from the "paid open source model").