Last night, a story on MacRumors.com grabbed my interest. It was grabbed for two reasons:

1. I could land a booty of 10 apps from MacHeist for the iBook that would normally cost me $400, but for just $49
2. This, apparently, is highly controversial

Now, most of the apps are OK, but not the type you would run out and buy as if your life depended on it. I already have and use Textmate, so that didn’t add value. I’d been meaning to grab copies of DEVONthink and RapidWeaver for a few months now and $49 for those two alone is a saving. The fact I was able to get Delicious Library, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, Disco, iClip, a Pangea game (I chose Enigmo 2, which is already sucking me in), and NewsFire as bonuses and for no extra money, just made it a bit more interesting for me.

Now, here’s the thing. The blogosphere is on fire about this, not because of the remarkable value, but because the developers providing the software are apparently being ‘ripped off’ by MacHeist and despite going into this with both eyes wide open, are obviously being conned. Here’s some examples:

for MacHeist to call it “The Week of the Independent Mac Developer” and to practically give away the software… well, that’s just a fucking insult to me and all the other hard working developers out there. – Gus Mueller

My understanding is that the developers taking part in the bundle are getting a flat rate for participating. That means that the more bundles MacHeist sells, the more money MacHeist makes, while the developers will get no additional money. Each new user adds support costs, so the more bundles they sell, the worse off each developer may be. – Paul @ Rogue Amoeba

The argument is not that MacHeist are being underhand. Rather it is that the developers are only making a fixed fee and MH are making a bundle on the back of them.

So are the developers idiots? Have they been conned? If you read Gus Mueller’s fiscal breakdown, you see that MacHeist are canny businessmen if nothing else. Here’s some of the comments from the developers who got involved:

Gus has strong opinions and I love him for that, but none of us who are bundled with MacHeist were forced to do so; we knew ahead of time what the price would be and how much we’d get, and we decided it was worth it for us.

I think events like this get a lot of publicity, so they bring in new customers that I wouldn’t reach on my own. So I’m not really sabotaging my sales; I’m supplementing them. Seriously, if you came to me and said, “I’m going to resell Delicious Library to customers on the moon, who you’ve never met and can’t reach, for $1 a copy,” I’d say, “Go for it!” I don’t care if I only get a penny if it’s a penny more than I would have gotten on my own. – Wil Shipley of Delicious Library

Let’s see, if we sold 2,000 copies of FotoMagico in one day, we would have made $160,000. That would have been really cool. But usually we don’t sell as many. In fact, I think most of the 2,000 people who bought the MacHeist bundle on this first day did not buy it for FotoMagico and would never have bought FotoMagico separately. Many of them probably will never use it. – Oliver Briedenbach of FotoMagic

While MacHeist may be taking a bigger cut of the profit than the ten developers involved, I actually think the guys at Macheist deserve it. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up something as slick as this.

You also have to remember that MacHeist is only going to get a single hit of cash from this project, where as the developers will be reaping the benefits for a long time to come, paid upgrades anyone?

A lot of noise has been made about the cost of supporting all these new users. But, I don’t think that argument holds up very well, especially seeing as we’ve only had two support e-mails from MacHeist customers.

Also, the fact that MacHeist has raised nearly $50,000 for charity and they still have 3 days to go shouldn’t be overlooked. I think this is just incredible! If they continue at this rate they may even hit $100,000 for charity. If I knew they’d raised that much I’d have probably put RapidWeaver in for free! – RealMac blog - developers of RapidWeaver

So what to make of it all? To my mind, the developers have hit a master stroke with this. They realised this was an opportunity to do some marketing and get paid for it, rather than the usual trick of paying to get exposure. Thousands of downloads have happened, and their apps are now on the hard drives of people who had never heard of them before. The legacy of being involved is going to be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars, so what if MacHeist walked away with a bundle of cash up front? When was the last time a PR agency offered to give you $5,000 in exchange for putting your software in front of thousands of users? If somebody offered me, or indeed any developer I know, that deal it would take approximately 0.001 second to bite their hand off.

License keys and software are bits and bytes. The cost of production of 10,000 copies is pretty much the same as for 1,000 copies, so if you’ve only sold 1,000 copies at full price, and 9,000 people are walking around unprepared to pay full price for your software, how much would you pay to get those 9,000 people to pay $1 each? What if it didn’t cost you anything? Would you take the deal?

If you answered ‘no’, you don’t deserve to be in the software business. If you already are, I fully expect you to go bankrupt in the next five years, because you evidently don’t grasp the realities of software distribution in the early 21st-century.

You may be sceptical - will it really work, you may wonder?

Well, I’m a customer. Here’s the apps I bought, what I know of them before downloading them, and what my impressions are now. If a developer of a package reads this, they might get an idea of what the other users are thinking of this great little deal, and how they might build on the legacy 10,000 of us have just paid to give them:

• Delicious Library - When this app came out ages ago, I thought “so what?”. To me, a personal library management system is a little, well, anal. I don’t own an iSight, so the cool barcode scanning stuff is lost on me, too.

  I opened up the app last night though, and started typing in a couple of ISBN numbers of books on my desk. All of a sudden, it made sense - I could catalogue the huge pile of books I had in a corner, and get up-to-date market prices for them from Amazon, export lists for friends if they want to borrow them, you name it. I would never, ever have paid $40 for this, but I’m glad I now have it. If upgrades cost less than $20/year, I may be in.

• DEVONthink - I’ve been planning to buy this for a while. Playing with it last night, I got to build a few interesting setups to help with product development, and I expect I will be pushing it to its limits soon. I realise even now that in a month or so, I may need to upgrade to the Pro or Office edition. They’ve got a customer out of me instead of a procrastinator.

• Disco - Really don’t see the point, but I don’t burn a lot of discs and my graphics card isn’t up to showing the ‘smoke’ effect. I’m sure it’s brilliant, but this is an app I knew I wouldn’t need, don’t need and won’t need. That said, I’m now aware of the developer, and they’re in my RSS feeds, so they now have my eyeballs for the time being, which is a powerful thing to have. I am somebody with a mac and disposable income, so the developers should be glad they got paid to get my attention rather than the other way around.

• FotoMagico - I already have Keynote even though I don’t do many presentations, but I can already see ways this is better. What’s more, where Keynote is built for purely presentations, FotoMagico looks like a better fit for a couple of simple training presentations I have lined up in the New Year. A real gem of a find in the bundle, for me.

• Enigmo 2 - Never heard of it, never seen it, never thought about it. I’m now an addict. They have me as a customer for the long haul, I’ll be in the queue for Enigmo 3 if it ever exists, and I’ll look at all the other titles they release. Great coding, great artwork, great idea.

• iClip - This is one of those apps where you think “I’m not paying $30 for that!” but I’ve used it 7 times just in the production of this blog article. Fantastic little tool, and I can quickly see it being a tool I won’t be able to live without in the very near future.

• NewsFire - I currently use Bloglines as my RSS reader, but have started getting quite hacked off by it recently. For me at least, Bloglines is buggy at times. This looks interesting, and I’m going to give it a run at my huge OPML file in the next few weeks and see where I end up. It may just be they have a convert, but this is the kind of app I need to spend weeks, if not months, with before making a call.

• RapidWeaver - I saw a screenshot of this a while back, and remember wishing “if it was $10 cheaper, I’d probably buy that”. I regularly have to put together small websites that I can’t be bothered with coding up in HTML, I need something better than OSWD.org, and iWeb sucks. As a simple little tool, this should save me time.

  What’s really interesting though, is when I started digging into theme development, I realised that I could use it as a tool for building mock-ups and views for my Rails apps as well, and building themes looks fun. It may very well be that the site re-design for vagueware.com happens in RapidWeaver, because it knows CSS and XHTML way better than I do, and is the first tool I’ve seen to give me the flexibility I need. Throw into the mix I’m going to be buying upgrades and maybe even theme packs in future, this is a good deal for the developer.

• ShapeShifter - I hate UI tweak programmes, because most of the themes produced aren’t actually very easy on the eye for the kind of 12-14 hour days I pull in front of screen. I found a couple of themes for ShapeShifter that are nice on the eye and more comfortable than Aqua, to me at least. I would never have tried this software unless it was in the bundle, but from now on I think they have me as an upgrade customer.

• TextMate - I’ve been using TM for around 9-10 months now. It is not the be-all and end-all everybody seems to make of it, but it’s a daily companion in my work and I’m grateful for its simplicity, power and flexibility. A spare license for the new machine after New Year is a boon.

Whilst I talk about the new hardware, it’s worth pointing out that iClip, DEVONthink, Pangea (Enigmo) and RealMacSoftware (RapidWeaver) are going to be seeing my credit card once more as I buy second licenses for a second machine.

As a marketing exercise, it’s genius to my mind. If somebody offered to give me money for customer exposure, I’d be grateful for it. I think my comments above show that for most of the developers, it has worked in that spirit for me at least very well - I would never have bought their apps before, and now I’m keen on their code. Instead of paying money for clicks, advertising, sponsorship, whatever, they have stumbled on a way of making a few thousand dollars whilst carrying out this marketing exercise and in the long run it is going to make them a lot of money, in my opinion.

Exposure in this case has been far more profitable than trying to make sure every license is paid for at full price, which is of course the underlying argument for giving away books, blog posts, podcasts and software of all flavours: exposure is a better commodity than cashflow when you’re planning on being around for the long haul. In a World where ideas and software are cheap to move around, ideas like this show us the future of marketing and it is a remarkable business model.

As for the cynics, well, they’re either jealous and being sour, or they really are just too stupid to get the fiscal advantage. I hope they change their minds, and I can’t wait for the next MacHeist bundle.