The other thing about a paid messenger service is that you not only have to pay the small fee, but convince your friends and family to pay as well, not to mention getting them to believe that the app is trustworthy and won't result in sketchy charges. This makes it so much easier to pitch free messaging apps, since you can always tell them to uninstall it if they don't like it.

That's why I believe the right payment model for paid apps/services is being able to sponsor another user.

The Apple App Store allows this (you can gift apps), but Google Play has no such mechanism unfortunately.

Threema would need to switch to an in-app purchase model in order to be able to handle "gifted/sponsored apps" manually, but then people would probably be pissed because "the app looks free but then requests a payment".

The Android version can also be obtained (and gifted) through https://shop.threema.ch/, but this requires manually installing an APK. The best way would be for Google to provide a means to gift apps to others in the Play store. I really can't comprehend why they don't do this.

The cost in itself isn't a barrier, but it compounds hidden network effects making it a problem.

I paid for Threema this month while looking for WA alternatives. I had to pay the money just to find out that absolutely nobody in my contacts uses Threema.

Was it a waste of money? Maybe, but I'm ok with being the first, most people would not be ok with that and I have a very real concern I'll never see a friend join me there, then it would be money wasted.

WhatsApp charged its users to continue using it after a year, I wish Threema took this approach. I paid that money without issue because I already saw the value, so did a lot of people I know. So it's clearly not that people won't pay, but they need to show their customers it's worth it first.

come on ... it's like 4 bucks or something.

My take on it would be that people see cars for example as a physical item. And that item comes with real expenses. Fuel, parking tickets and whatnot. Your conditioned for this when you get your first car

Mobile phones apart from the device itself are seen as free. Your conditioned to expect to get apps for free, I expect content to be free.

So when you start asking for money; there is no association between the price wanted and a physical object. Only an application which was free.

I think this is because of the prevalence of free (as in free beer) software. The moment this became normalized, every time something actually does ask for money, you have to decide that the expenditure is indeed worth it. Yes, 4 bucks is a pittance in absolute terms for many people, but they still don't want to just throw it out the window, so they have to actually take the mental energy of justifying this purchase.

And yes you could say that the same people won't bat an eye spending 4 bucks on beer, but beer is an immediate reward in itself. The brain is usually already wired to automatically reward it's own decision to buy beer and buying one beer lessens the very restraints that would stand in the way of buying beer to begin with.

These factors are usually not present when buying an app, unless it's a game or similar or it becomes a "passion" purchase.

I don't know how to fix this. I would like to blame Ad Tech and the blight of "free" apps that fund themselves out of mining people's data. I think it is fair to say that this was a contributing factor at least. At the same time, I think there is genuine value in a proposition where people can pick to get the product for "free" and sell their data, or pay for the product and keep their data private.