Every Twitter Client Should Cost $20!

Tweetbot for Mac launched today, and its $20 price tag is getting a strong reaction. Some people are turned off, a bunch of people are standing up for it, others are just confused. (The Tweetbot guys explain why it costs $20 here; in short, because Twitter is limiting the number of people who can use it, so it has to cost more than they’d like.)

This is okay with me. I spent $30+ on an FTP app the other day and that’s a fine deal, too.

If you use Twitter enough that you need a dedicated app for it — vs. the free website — you should pay what it’s worth. I’ve sent almost 26,000 tweets over the last ~5 years, and I’ve spent a grand total of $10 for Twitter apps before today. That’s an outrageously good deal: less than $0.0004 per tweet sent. (Ok, fine, maybe it’s closer to $0.0005 per tweet, assuming I sent a few from the web, too.)

Spending $20 for something you’ll get hours of use out of every day should seem like a great deal, not a crappy one.

Anyway, yes, I understand the economics that the App Store has settled on — mass quantity x low price = happiness, or something. Apple doesn’t have much of an incentive to see App Store prices increase. Twitter would rather Tweetbot for Mac not exist, which has put us here in the first place.

But I like this little outlier. And — perhaps selfishly, as a future App Store publisher — I’d like to see more, higher prices for good software.