Autodesk Killed App Pricing

Edit: I know that this app has been out for a while, but Autodesk has given validity to the app pricing model

I got up the morning to find that Autodesk had released a new vector drawing app. Due to my intense interest in the field, I decided to check it out. However, what I found was an abomination.

The app itself is very well done. Not anything new and innovative in terms of the UI, but it has all the basic features one would need in a vector drawing software package. Then I saw the price tag. The despicable price of 8.99. This is undoubtably a win for the consumer. It’s great to see software prices go down in order to help more people get involved in digital designing. There’s a big caveat to that though. This is a killer blow to developers who have been praying for App Store prices to normalize around prices that justify development.

Right now, we have a mindset that 99 cents is far too much to pay for an app. Whereas on desktop it’s a pretty standard practice of charging around 50–100 dollars for high quality software that devs put a lot of work into. Look at Sketch by Bohemian Coding. They were an independent developer who were able to support themselves because they made an amazing app that was priced accordingly. 100 dollars is not a lot to ask for a piece of software with 100's of man hours behind it.

Now, with the mobile app market in desperate need for high quality creation tools, a large company like Autodesk comes out with an app that’s very good, but kills any hope for innovation in the vector app market. I know an independent developer who has been rethinking their major product release because that can’t survive on 8.99 per download. At the very least Autodesk should have released their app for 20 dollars in my opinion. But instead they have fed the mindset that 99 cents is an expensive product and have limited the ability for small developers to succeed.