However, I think the point being missed here is not just how long it takes to write the app but how much extra time the original developer spends supporting and maintaining it.

As anyone who’s actually done it will appreciate – releasing an application involves a whole lot more than just cutting the code.

You’ve got (in no particular order); site design, serial number generation, e-store setup (and design), documentation, internationalization, press releases, download sites to notify, Leopard upgrades, customer emails etc. etc.

I’d argue that a simple bug fix and point release for Pukka probably takes upwards of 2 hours. In my experience releasing version 1.0 is where the work actually starts…

When copying an application you have the original developers work to guide you in UI design, feature set, etc.

Building an app from ground up requires so much more than typing in the code to implement a specific feature set. Just getting the user interface right can take weeks of work and many revisions. Yes, you could have used the “out of the box” components that Apple provides, but then your UI would feel generic too.

To get the right look and feel takes an enormous amount of time in experimentation, prototyping, and reworking your entire application for not just one release but over months and sometimes years.

Another component of pricing that I haven’t heard discussed yet is technical support. It costs people’s time to answer support questions, whether they are technical, sales, or enhancement requests. Someone has to read and respond to these user’s questions. Support is one of the primary differentiators between free and commercial software.

Otherwise, those little apps that “look” like you could code them in two hours are worth every penny.

Note that I wrote “look” in quotes, because I don’t think you would get the kind of polish that Pukka has in two hours. Yes, you could get the core functionality in two hours, maybe just a bookmarklet. But in my experience, that’s 10% of the work. The remaining 90% is the polish, and all the thought cycles that go in making it the best app you can make. One does not always code at the keyboard :-)

I think it’s more of an issue for customers who have enough technical knowledge about a platform to understand how an application is built. It’s easy to “do the math” and lowball an estimate of how long something should take to do.

I ran into this kind of thing a lot while I was doing consulting. You’ll get the client who is flabbergasted by how long you say something will take. They go away intent on finding somebody else to do it in 1 day, and inevitably come back asking you again to do it.

Part of my motivation for writing this was the feeling that so often, the “easy” parts that aren’t the core of an app, often take up so much more time than you’d think.

And if you do hack up a Pukka clone in two hours this weekend, let me know. I suggest using PyObjC. And feel free to skip the dock menu full of tags.

Yes, certainly distributing an application is a much bigger task than simply hacking something up for yourself, but that doesn’t mean you should lose sight of a realistic price point.

My feeling is that this sort of application falls more into the hobby category. This is the sort of thing a programmer would tend to do “for fun” on the side. It’s not really complex or unique enough to justify the price being asked. I’d imagine the author would make more money by lowering the price to something like $5, although I’m not sure the market for the app as it is is all that big to begin with so maybe it doesn’t matter.

In the end there is a long history of programmers releasing massive programs for free. That is not to say all programs should be free, or that people shouldn’t get paid for their work (I like being paid for mine), but that’s the economic situation we, as developers, face. I think Pukka is over priced, but that doesn’t really matter. People will either buy it or not, it’s not my problem.

If I have some time this weekend I might see what I can hack up in Cocoa just for fun. It’d be interesting to see if I could replicate Pukka in my mythic two hours.