DMs Guild DMs Guild: do you think it is okay to charge some people more than others?

Giant2005 said:

I may have phrased that question a little badly and it probably comes off extremely click-baity because of it, but I genuinely have no idea how to ask the question better in a concise manner.

My issue is that I want to reduce the price of two of my products down to PWYW, but plenty of people have purchased those same products with an actual price tag. I feel like I'd be ripping them off by forcing them to pay for the products that I now intend to give out for free.

Do you think reducing the price would be unethical?

Click to expand...

No, it's not unethical. It's also fairly standard for early adopters of items to pay a bit extra to get it much earlier than everyone else. What's more, if you've made what you consider a decent return on your initial investment with the initial run of paying customers, reducing the price is pretty standard in many industries for a product that's been out for a while.

I know this is a bit opposite to the current trend of crowdfunding, where early adopters instead get a discount and some extras. But...that's a different model, using a different and well-established infrastructure. And DM's Guild isn't a crowdfunding site, so expecting products on it to follow that model isn't actually reasonable. On the contrary, the longer a product is out on a site like DMG, the more likely it should be to drop in price, not go up in price. PWYW is a good compromise after your initial investors let the product be paid for sufficiently enough to put your time into producing another product, and is less work than continually dropping the price until you find the sweet spot.

You have stumbled upon my pet peeve Everything in PWYW. If the people that bought it already paid for it, then they paid what they wanted to, or less. Nobody had a gun to their head.

If Apple brings out a new iPhone or drops the price the day after I buy mine, I think I am the only person in the world that does not get upset at that. I paid what I wanted to for it, if I was unwilling to pay that amount, I would not have done so. If somebody gets it cheaper, good for them. While I can kind of understand an emotional reaction to price drops, I cannot fathom feeling some sort of moral indignation in most circumstances. The human ability to manufacture moral indignation out of personal disappointment is a bugbear of mine.