Pricing Cycles Impact Downloads

One of my recent experiments was to try to determine if a specific day of the week being a paid day for my apps would produce better results overall.  As it turns out I have some results and proof of how important it is to cycle your pricing in the AppStore.

At the end of 2019 I was setting one paid day per week and moving that day across the days of the week every few weeks to see how things changed.  In January I resumed my cycle of Mondays and Thursdays being paid.  Given that information, take a look at this chart:

You can see how fast my downloads were growing prior to the single day per week experiments and how fast they spiked again once I resumed the two paid days per week cycle.  I would suggest that you spike your pricing as often as possible to get the greatest growth in your audience that you can.

Another thing that has changed is the way Apple allows you to set your pricing changes.  I've noticed that I can no longer set Tier 1 for Monday and Tier 0 for Tuesday.  Now you have to have a full day of a Tier before you can switch back.  This should be interesting and I'm thinking that this has to do with others figuring out this pattern of behavior as well.

My new pricing cycle is to set Sunday as the beginning of my paid day, Tuesday as the end (covering Monday), then Wednesday as another beginning and Friday as an end (covering Thursday).  I don't know if this change in scheduling is simply cosmetic, meaning that it is more reflective of the behavior in the store itself, or if this change will cause my app to appear in each tier for more than a single day.  I will give more details as my results come back.

Have a great weekend!