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What Happens When Apple Features Your App?

BillMinder is our most popular application. It has been in the Top 20 Paid Finance apps since it’s release over a year ago. We recently made a lot of changes to BillMinder and got some unexpected but appreciated help from Apple, <3. We thought we’d share what we did and what it changed.

Push
In the middle of July we launched Push Notifications support in BillMinder. Early on, we could tell Push for BillMinder would be very server intensive. Unlike with other real-time apps, our push server couldn’t just forward messages it received to our users. It would have to maintain a database of (anonymized) bills on our server. This database would need to stay in sync each users installation of BillMinder. We would also have to regularly check the database to notify users of upcoming bills. Timezones suck. All of this made us realize that we couldn’t just give away push with our (regularly) $1.99 app. We had seen too many other apps do server side stuff and fail miserably in terms of reliability, plus the cost was going to be pretty high. We couldn’t afford to host the server, write and maintain the server software to run it at a loss. We decided that a yearly fee of $0.99 USD (or equal currency in your region) would cover the costs needed to maintain the server. Since it’s initial release, we’ve had to upgrade our push server twice to compensate for the additional load. We will continue to do so as needed in the future.

Since version 1.6 hit the store, about 2800 users have purchased the push add-on feature. From those users, we currently maintain a database of 115k bills. As of today, we have sent out notifications for 27k bills. Only a small percentage (about 10-15%) buy the push feature. We realize that we’re potentially losing sales for charging for the push feature, but we feel that doing so gives those who use the service the best experience possible.

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