Ask HN: What iOS app pricing strategy worked for you?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2019 where @cvaidya1986 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 8 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
It really depends on the type of app you’re offering and your user acquisition costs/strategy.
Freemium games with in-app purchases and ads worked for me but I’m sure paid apps in top categories can do amazingly well.
I recommend you do some research in sensor tower to get an idea of the landscape.
I did public transport train routing and scheduling app for my city.
Free + iAP worked for me, with around 4% conversion rate. Granted that the iAP is priced at just $0.99, most feature are free, just that viewing the train ticket price and which stations are near to certain attraction places require iAP