I participate in this year’s BundleHunt “Holiday Bundle” (running until January). I submitted both the Word Counter and TableFlip – mostly to see what happens.

The Bundle Experiment

I’ll disclose the details of my calculation later. This is an experiment: does presence in a bundle with so many hundreds of thousands of subscribers affect my regular sales and visibility? Being part of the bundle is like advertising, only I don’t really pay anything, I just make a lot less money when somebody buys the app from the bundle ($0.60 per license sold, or 97% discount for an app priced at $19.99). If the bundle sells 5000 times and 50% of bundles include one of my apps, that’s about $47,000 I will thus have “spent” on marketing. Imagine that. What a crazy number!

“These 2500 people could’ve paid you $20 instead and you’d be rich!” – Not quite.

My tools are targeted at users with very specific needs. The bundle is mostly targeted at folks wanting to make a deal. It’s people I may usually not attract at all. So even if I sell 2500 licenses through the bundle, I bet most of the customers will be people who wouldn’t have bought the apps without the bundle. I don’t really lose money if that’s true.

Part of the experiment is to find out what kind of people are going to buy the bundle.

Bundle Customer Ethics

I said this sometime in the past already: if you care about 1 app in a bundle of 10 and don’t want or need the other 9, contact the developer directly and ask for a discount. If MyDreamApp costs $50 and is part of a bundle for $20, ask the developer to buy the app directly for $20. This way they will make 10x more than from the bundle alone (ignoring bundle fees). That’s infinitely more % than not having you as a customer at all. It’s a good deal for everybody.

If you really do want to buy the BundleHunt Holiday Bundle because of the great offer, use this link and I’ll get $5 extra as an affiliate. Merci beaucoup!