Weekly Poll: Developers – Would You Kill Your Free App?

In a long and detailed blog post, Marco Arment, creator of the popular “read later” application Instapaper explained why he decided to kill off the app’s free version. According to Arment, his decision was due to the “significant costs in development and support,” “the undesirable customers” the free version attracted, the low conversion rates from free to paid and several other factors.

The move has been applauded by many in the tech industry, including GigaOm’s Om Malik, and has even persuaded others to go out and purchase the app for the first time. But do you think this strategy would work for you? Or is Instapaper an exception because it’s already a well-known, established brand delivering a service known to provide value? Let’s us know if you’ve been inspired to kill off your free app in this week’s ReadWriteMobile poll.

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Arment’s blog post is well worth the read for any and all mobile app developers who have struggled with pricing and the maintenance of a separate (but not equal) free version of their mobile application.

Why Did He Do It?

After experimenting with pulling the free version of Instapaper on different occasions to promising results (our coverage) – no one noticed and paid sales went up – Arment decided it was time to kill off the free version for good. He says that it was costly to support the app, since the ad-supported version made far less than the paid version, and the customers who chose the free app were, quote, “undesirable.”

Explains Arment:

“Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable…I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?”

He also found that those on the free version were not very likely to upgrade to the paid version for the extra features, so, to them, the free version was the only app these customers would ever see. Arment added that there was minimal demand for the free version, too, noting that it has been out of the App Store for nearly 2 months with few having noticed.

The more controversial part of Arment’s blog post is at the end, where he evangelizes to other developers that they should try this too. This isn’t a case of Instapaper being “special,” he says. “Every app is a special case.”

“Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging “a lot” for an iPhone app from the start. Maybe you think I can only do this because my blog is moderately popular among geeks like me. If so, I assure you that my blog’s audience is smaller than you think,5 and is extremely insignificant relative to the size of the iOS app market. Maybe you think there aren’t enough people willing to pay $5 for an app with no free version. I used to think that, too. But I was wrong.”

Poll

So what do you think, developers?

Did Arment inspire you to consider killing off the free version of your app as well? Let us know in the poll below. Non-developers, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Discuss