Topic: OT: exchange store

[nekitip]

Since this has nothing to do with .NET AutoCAD API, then this may not be the place for this topic, hence OT (admins, feel free to move this wherever you see fit)
...
So I'm iterested to hear from you who have your apps published (Autodesk Exchange Apps, and Bricscad), and are willing to share some statistical info if not secret.
In general and average:
-how many daily downloads you get per app?
-how many paid downloads per app?

As for myself, I've had a few smaller apps published and I've seen in general about 1-4 downloads par day during working days. I'm talking about free apps. As for paid, I get maybe one download per month. To test things more, I've changed price up and down, just to see what will happen, and I have not come up with any pattern.
How about you?

Autodesk stuff is acting this is some sort of a secret and they do not really give details. There are two gecko boards available, both showing different figures, and only for total downloads. And for paid apps, nothing. But Autodesk has once came out with figures like: "1000 paid apps download per Q". Since i guess there is about 1300-1400 apps on store, this is a small number.

[gile]

Hi,

I have some published apps on AutoCAD store. The number of downloads depends on applications, some have much more success than others.
You can see the below picture where "Date Published" are those of the last update (AutoCAD 2015 support).

Below, the fisrt date the apps were published and an average of downloads (per day for free apps and per month for paid ones):

• OsnapPalette (trial):     2012/08/13     0.88/day
• OsnapPalette:             2012/09/04     2.24/month
• Increment:                2012/09/17     5.52/day
• Introduction à AutoLISP:  2013/08/26     1.01/day
• ZombieKiller:             2013/09/06     3.30/day
• 3dPolyFillet:             2013/09/10     2.54/day
• LinkData:                 2013/09/10     0.71/day
• RadicalPurge:             2013/09/10     7.23/day
• BatchPurge:               2014/05/26     2.31/month

[CADbloke]

Considering the number of users AutoCAD has these aren't big numbers...quite dismal, really (he groans as he hits enter on Commit #800 of an as-yet unreleased AutoCAD plugin).

I'd love to hear about comparisons between downloads / sales via the Exchange Store versus outside channels. 1000 paid apps per Quarter is a reasonable target for one product, nevermind an entire store, particularly with a user-base in the millions.

One thing they told us a the AU Dev Day was that they were trying to get more paid apps (and expensive ones too) into the Store and less free apps.

On a kind-of replated point, this thread on HackerNews about Enterprise pricing is a good read. Also realted(ish), I've sold a few bundles of utilities I've written (in VBA, Lisp, C#) for my own use for a couple of hundred dollars / seat in the past, simply because the buyers found value in them. I was reluctant to sell them because I felt the apps were a bit ropey (they were but they worked) but they literally begged me to sell them. I had surprisingly few support issues with them and they're still using them, as far as I know. My lesson there was that people will pay good money if they are still getting a good deal, more than for a cup of coffee for sure.

Utterly unrelated: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ is a good resource / leaping point for info on micropreneurship as-is HackerNews (if you have that many hours in your day - I don't)

[nekitip]

Gile, thank you very much for this detail info!!
This means my download rates are of the same order of magnitude as yours, but this is still low.
I thought I was doing something wrong, but people actually don't download stuff?

@CADbloke, I'm kind of getting the same idea, and that is that the price is not that important if the user finds app usefull. I've played with the price on one app from 10 USD to 8 to 4. And there was the same download rate. Now I'll set it to about 20 USD, since I now longer have much hope it will matter

How about you other people? What is your experience?
What are your downlad rates?

And yeah, there was the graph from autodesk once showing download rate of 1000 paid apps / Q. Since we don't know how many paid apps there are, we can only speculate how many paid download in average there is per app.
As for downloads in total, I've forgot to post links that are supposed to be showing total downloads, but are showing different numbers. One if from exchange store, and one from blog of one of autocad developers.
https://autodesk360.geckoboard.com/dashboards/50961E741A7014C9
https://autodesk360.geckoboard.com/dashboards/23708A59DAE03700

EDIT:
I've now found time to read discussions on the links CADbloke provided about setting the price on your product. I recommend everyone to read this, very interesting.