Monday, November 9, 2009

Two conversations about one thing

I've been wanting to buy an interval training app for my ipod that will allow me to program interval times and rest times, and beep over my music when I need to switch paces. The basic stopwatch isn't good enough and I don't want to twist my ankle restarting it for every interval.

I recently read a review for an app called ITGO made by Appnoose, and the review was great, with an introductory price of $1.99. I decided to go home and buy the app. I logged in only to find the price was now $5.99. I felt so shocked by this small amount (a giant % change though, right?) that I decided not to buy (later feeling foolish and correcting this decision). Here is a little conversation MrM and I had on the night that I decided not to buy.

I said: I need to be on the computer for a minute. I want to buy this interval training app that I read about. It just costs one ninety nine.
He thinks: That's pricey at $199. Maybe it is for something special like marathons...
He says: Is it for marathon training or what?
I said: No, just for regular workouts.

We go quiet, I bring up itunes and suffer sticker shock at the $5.99

I said: Crap! itunes says it is FIVE ninety nine.
He thinks: HOLY CRAP! $599! I don't want to be cheap, but that's a lot of money for a little piece of code.
He says: That's a lot for an app! You know you can just write a perl script to do this.
I thought: Wow - he's really cheap. He wants me to spend hours writing code instead of buying this for $5.99
I said: I'm sure I could write a perl script, but I need it to be an ipod app so I can take it around with me.
He said: I'm sure you can write that easily.
I said: No, I don't have the time, I would rather buy.
He thinks: I know your time is worth a lot, but is it worth $599?
He says: Whatever works.

After I thought about my end of the conversation and made up my mind to buy it anyway, I told MrM how I felt silly about shying away from an extra four dollars when I could spend that so easily on a coffee.

He said: Four dollars?
I said: Yeah. $5.99 minus $1.99 is 4 dollars. Not considering tax deltas.
He said: When you said Five-Ninety-Nine, you meant Five dollars Ninety Nine cents?!!

1 comment:

MrM said...

Yeah, I tried hard to be on my good behaviour, but $599 for an app - that's really steep. It was hard to bite my tongue and eventually I failed ... :) - We had a good laugh afterwards though.