Hybrid pricing can help app developers better monetize their apps

W

elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

It seems like everyone has been talking about Lensa AI this week, but a less obvious point of this AI-enabled chart topper caught my attention: its hybrid pricing. Could it be an example of a new path that more developers will follow? Let’s explore. — Anna

Black Friday(s)

App pricing has long been a point of contention between Apple and developers. “Staunch Apple critics, like Spotify for example, have argued for years that the lack of pricing flexibility hinders their business,” TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported.

Apple seems to have taken complaints into account: This week, the Cupertino firm announced that its App Store pricing system will progressively enable more price points and will allow developers to “set prices for apps, in-app purchases or subscriptions as low as $0.29 or as high as $10,000, and in rounded endings (like $1.00) instead of just $0.99.”

The demand for more pricing flexibility is a consequence of another trend: A shift from paid app downloads to subscription-based models that may require more granularity to optimize revenue. But some developers haven’t waited for Apple’s decision to come up with hybrid pricing models — those combining subscription economics and other types of monetization — that could soon become the norm.

Hybrid pricing can help app developers better monetize their apps by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch