Dunnit! goes Radiohead on the App Store - Pay What You Want
by Robb Lewis
April 5, 2010
When Radiohead released their album In Rainbows in 2007, they offered fans a chance to pay whatever they wanted for a digital download of the album. Well now the popular, OpenFeint enabled to-do app Dunnit!, which we wrote about last month, has decided to try this same approach in the app store.
According to the post by Runloop, the makers of Dunnit!, they have been struggling to get sales and have decided to make the app free permenantly after offering it for free last week as part of a Free App A Day promotion. To accomadate for the loss of profit, the next update will include a 'nag' screen shown every 5th time a user opens the app, and they will be offered the chance to pay whatever they think the app is worth. In return, depending on the amount paid, users will recieve a points boost for a specific amount of time which will boost their OpenFeint score.
This is new for the app store and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. But what about the people that already paid $4.99 for Dunnit! when it was released? Here's what Runloop has to say:
Users who bought Dunnit before 30 March will be considered to have donated already and the nag screen won't appear. This is assuming the app hasn't been reinstalled after that point.I would be happy to pay to remove a nag if I liked an app and this model gives users a way to try an app before spending some of their precious app budget (you do have an app budget, right?). But surely users would just pay the lowest price and be done with it? Well if Radiohead's pay-what-you-want album release is anything to go by, maybe not. A survey of 3,000 fans showed that the average price paid was $8 with many paying over $20. Only time will tell if this model works for Dunnit! and if it doesn't we may see development stopped. Would you be willing to pay to get rid of a nag screen? Or do you prefer free apps with adverts? Let us know in the comments. View the announcement here [link]