I wrote somewhat extensively about software pricing, just before choosing a number for my then “nearing completion” product, FlexTime. The price I settled on was $18.95. I thought it would only be fair to report back with some data on the sales of FlexTime, after a month of availability at this price.

You’ll recall that $18.95 is a dollar less than what Brent Simmons suggested was the minimum price for software to be taken seriously. I did consider pricing above $20, but ultimately decided that, at least in its 1.0 incarnation, FlexTime’s feature set did not justify such a move. But I wanted to at least take baby steps in that direction, so I picked $18.95 for the beauty of the numbers, and for the thrill I got from pricing it a full $4 higher than my other products.

Sales have been encouraging, though certainly not a runaway success. In the 35 days since FlexTime went on sale, I have won 33 paying customers. And they seem happy. Subtract the commissions from Kagi and PayPal and I’m left with a cool $500 in revenue. Not enough to live on, nor enough to pay for the hundreds of hours that went into building and fine-tuning the app. But it’s a start. Beats donation-ware.

Especially interesting to me was observing the effect of the “red zone.” This term, also compliments of Brent Simmons, refers to the period of time surrounding the expiration of a trial period. For FlexTime, the trial period is 30 days. So while sales around its release on August 17 were fairly good, they dropped considerably after a couple weeks, to almost nothing. I waited and hoped that the red zone would pan out, and it did. At least to the tune of a few sales. Yesterday was “day 34,” and it was the single biggest sales day I’ve ever had: 5 freaking copies! I’m looking forward to a day when such a daily number seems disappointing, but for now I am getting a charge out of it. It can only go up from here.

But was the price wrong? Maybe at $9.95 I would have sold 200 copies, for around $1600 in revenue. Or at $35 maybe it would have sold 23 copies for $800. There’s no way to know, though it might be worth experimenting with a sale. One good thing about “erring upward” is it’s much easier to justify a temporary price reduction than a spike the other direction. I can’t announce, “This week only! FlexTime is available for the special price of $35!”

There is an adage that goes something like “if nobody’s complaining, then the price is too low.” I have been satisfied that complaints about FlexTime’s price are few and far between. Some people have suggested that the price would be more palatable at around $10. For them, I hope they eventually decide to cough up the extra $9 and come on board. The service and support is worth it. Really, I’m that good.

I was browsing the large collection of books at the Brewster Library Book Sale this summer. I ended up buying an old paperback, “How to Stay Alive in the Woods,” by Bradford Angier. The copyright is 1956, but to my surprise it’s still available from Amazon (last printing 1998). I read it mostly contemplating what my sorry vegetarian ass would do if forced to survive off of bear blood or rabbit’s droppings. But towards the end of the book, in discussing the equipment one might purchase before trekking into the wilderness, Angier cites a quotation from John Ruskin:

“There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Although this was written 100 years ago, it rings especially true for software. Keep that in mind before whining too loudly about the next $18.95 product you’re on the verge of buying.

FlexTime begs to be controlled remotely. That is, from across the room where you’re doing your dance, meditation, or presentation. Apple is shipping remote controls with more and more of its computers, but has done little to enable integration with 3rd party applications.

Fortunately two great applications exist for managing the remote’s functionality in a number of applications. Sofa Control and Mira each provide support for FlexTime, bridging the gap between your computer and where you’re sitting, standing, or jumping while you use FlexTime.

Twisted Melon, the company behind Mira, has taken things one step further and developed a hardware product to give Apple Remote support to those of whose machines don’t come with it built-in.

Cool stuff!

A reader pointed out that a 3rd app, Remote Buddy also targets this crowded field of applications. But Remote Buddy doesn’t seem to have any built-in or downloadable support for FlexTime.

I just finished reading The Monk and the Riddle, on the recommendation of Paul from Rogue Amoeba. It’s a sort of business philosophy book by Randy Komisar (with writing help from Kent Lineback).

It was a surprisingly fast read. Enjoyable and inspirational. But let me summarize it in one sentence:

The two most recurring themes in the book are roughly “the journey is the reward,” and “how can you change your current work so you’d be willing to do it for the rest of your life?” He describes a malady that many of us are probably familiar with: the “deferred life plan.” This is the rationalization of present unhappiness as a mere means to an end. We’ll work for 40 years at a job we hate just so we can pursue our passion later in life.

Great food for thought, and especially pertinent in the wake of my recent article about the indie life. I tried to examine my own circumstances using these criteria, and it boils down to four basic desires. I want a job where I build cool apps, blog, exercise, and make music. Whenever inspiration strikes me. A tall order, I know. I’m not quite there, but am hopefully moving in the right direction.

What do you want to do for the rest of your life? Are you suffering under the deferred life plan?

FlexTime has a major flaw in it where references to AppleScripts are not reliably saved/restored in routine documents. I’ve fixed the problem but it actually required quite a bit of change to my scripting code. So… I’m both embarrassed about the bug and nervous about the changes. Rather than release an update and hope for the best over the weekend, I thought I’d float a beta build.

If you’re using FlexTime’s scripted cues and can’t seem to figure out why the script isn’t running reliably, don’t feel stupid, it’s not your fault! Please do me the favor of downloading FlexTime 1.0.4b1. You’ll find the scripting experience much less frustrating.

Assuming I don’t hear any negative feedback, I’ll be releasing a final 1.0.4 build next week, so this problem won’t bite too many more people.

Update: I released FlexTime 1.0.4 today (September 20, 2006) with no changes from the beta (aside from the version string).