Pricing policy for software is very interesting and unique area.

Software is not in the full sense of the physical product (except boxed versions) and can be propagated with very low cost. The basis of the software is Intellectual property as well as patent fees (in some areas).

The price of the software does not depend on the value of one-time investments its development any more, and the number of sold copies.

It is easy to spot, seeing that the popular software from large companies is often cheaper than similar programs from more narrowly specialized and small companies. This also can be seen in casual games, which require very significant investment (typically much bigger than the creation of many programs), while there are several times lower than system programs.

This whole thing in quantities of sold copies.

A major part of the cost which does not depend on the number of software distributed occupy the costs of technical support programs, the costs of billing and costs for online licensing. In all these cases, if the program is bought twice as much, it is just necessary to increase these costs twice.

Distribution of software for free, is in itself a utopian idea and cannot be used everywhere. For the most of these programs, developers are abusing the involvement of attention and focus more on advertising than on the field of creation and support of their programs. Of course, because in this case they do not receive money from customers and therefore they don’t bear legal or moral responsibility for the source product.

Yet prices for the programs may be rather low. Here's a simple example. A small company distributes a product that has a large static cost that is made by only one or more software products. At the same time, expensive program is so difficult to distribute. So sales come slowly. The product cost $ 100; a small company can sell about 100 copies per month. With such high costs, the company will pay well to its resellers, up to half of the cost. Thus the company will receive no more than 5 thousand dollars a month (and this is not profit but only a monthly turnover).

If we take a game distributed online as an example, you can see that at a price of 10 dollars, the firm could sell at least 2000 copies per month and often much more (if not very popular game) directly from your website without the participation of brokers. Simple arithmetic shows that at a lower price for the program, the company can get several times more revenue.

It turns out that the product, which is sold cheaper, has much more profit than the expensive one in fact. And, besides, much more money was invested in the cheaper product.

And what is about the quality of cheaper products? - Quality is usually higher than the road. Due to the large number of users (and reviews) as well as much larger investments, due to greater profits such products may exceed far the more expensive counterparts.

What we are doing, spreading the cheaper the software, we have a more widespread, and hence can get more feedback from users and to invest more in developing new and improving existing software products.