I've taken a lot of heat over the $3.99 price for the Android version the last few days. Apparently the tradition on Android is to offer apps for free and then pack them with ads. I'm not a huge fan of ads.
I personally think the app market is a bit warped regarding pricing. I have friends that refuse to pay $0.99 for an lifetime license for an app for their $300 phone that they pay $75/month to operate. They will then turn around and think nothing of paying $8-10 for a pint at the bar. I think we need to keep the pricing in perspective here.
Nevertheless - I'm not forcing anyone to buy the app. Its a free market - if you don't like the "iphone like" layout or don't need the functionality then don't buy it. If you want to wait for the full app, that's fine too. I decided up front to keep a consistent look across platforms, and also to integrate it tightly with the cloud to make it easy to move recipes between the desktop and your mobile device. I can paste a recipe in my cloud folder in BeerSmith, walk into the garage and run the brewday timer on it using my phone. For me, that has value. If I'm running low in space on my cloud folder, I can store some recipes locally on my phone - as many as I want.
Regarding the price of $3.99 - I think the app has value. The beta testers that carried their recipes with them, had access to the BeerSmithRecipes search anywhere and brewed using the timer found it worthwhile. Its handy to be able to pull your latest recipe while at the store or have it remind you to add that 10 minute hop addition.
I spent the last five months full time writing apps, and the software is how I make my living. Considering the average app sells less than 1,000 copies, the stores take about 30% up front, and beer software does not sell like "Angry Birds", I don't think I'll be retiring to the Bahamas on my app earnings anytime soon.
I do offer quite a bit to the home brewing community for free. I've written hundreds of articles for my blog for free, offer a podcast every other week for free, send a newsletter to thousands of people every week for free, authored and run BrewWiki.com (free), and authored BeerXML - the recipe exchange standard that most programs now use for beer recipes. Even BeerSmithRecipes.com which now has 10,000 members and 3,000 shared recipes is free for the vast majority of users.
I also sponsor many dozens of home brewing competitions - in fact I can't remember the last time I turned down a request to sponsor one.
So the software does pay the bills for all of the "free" stuff I'm able to offer. I'm not complaining - I consider myself very lucky to be able to make a living off of Beer Software and talk and write about homebrewing. I just wanted to take a minute to share my perspective with you.
Brad