Instapaper developer Marco Arment has been battling against what he sees as the unhealthy business of offering apps for free.
Back in the beginning of March he wrote a post about avoiding venture capital funding. His customers, wrote Arment, are his investors.
He even offered up a subscription service, which didn’t offer much in the way of additional features, acting more like a funnel for goodwill donations.
As an additional experiment, Arment pulled the free version of his iPhone app from the store. Yesterday he tweeted, “As an experiment, I temporarily pulled the Free app from the App Store over a month ago. Sales of the paid app remain great. Few complaints.”
For a man who once admitted he can’t even stomach saying the word “freemium“, this must be a very gratifying result.
