BillMinder is our most popular application. It has been in the Top 20 Paid Finance apps since it’s release over a year ago. We recently made a lot of changes to BillMinder and got some unexpected but appreciated help from Apple, <3. We thought we’d share what we did and what it changed.
Push
In the middle of July we launched Push Notifications support in BillMinder. Early on, we could tell Push for BillMinder would be very server intensive. Unlike with other real-time apps, our push server couldn’t just forward messages it received to our users. It would have to maintain a database of (anonymized) bills on our server. This database would need to stay in sync each users installation of BillMinder. We would also have to regularly check the database to notify users of upcoming bills. Timezones suck. All of this made us realize that we couldn’t just give away push with our (regularly) $1.99 app. We had seen too many other apps do server side stuff and fail miserably in terms of reliability, plus the cost was going to be pretty high. We couldn’t afford to host the server, write and maintain the server software to run it at a loss. We decided that a yearly fee of $0.99 USD (or equal currency in your region) would cover the costs needed to maintain the server. Since it’s initial release, we’ve had to upgrade our push server twice to compensate for the additional load. We will continue to do so as needed in the future.
Since version 1.6 hit the store, about 2800 users have purchased the push add-on feature. From those users, we currently maintain a database of 115k bills. As of today, we have sent out notifications for 27k bills. Only a small percentage (about 10-15%) buy the push feature. We realize that we’re potentially losing sales for charging for the push feature, but we feel that doing so gives those who use the service the best experience possible.
Security continues to be a priority to us so BillMinder sends only the minimal required, non-identifiable data to our server for push notifications over SSL.
UI
BillMinder has always been the most feature rich bill tracking application on the AppStore. However, it hasn’t always been the prettiest. During most of it’s life, we would focus our updates on fixing bugs, and adding new (mostly user suggested) features. Neither one of us are graphic designers, so the aesthetics of the app were always weak at best. This left the door open for other apps that were pretty, but had significantly fewer features to surpass us. And they did. We then realized something very fundamental about success on the app store. Looks matter. A lot. We knew it was time for a change, so we decided that our next update would be a major one, worthy of a new major number, 2.0. It would completely redesign the interface from the ground up. Instead of submitting version 2.0 as a new app, we decided to give it to existing users as a free update even though it was the largest update, in terms of development effort and cost, to date.
The new design was a big hit with our users, and sales showed it. Soon after release of 2.0, BillMinder shot up to #1 in Finance for the first time ever!
What’s Hot
Even though BillMinder was consistently in the top of its category, it has never really garnered any big attention from anyone, including Apple. That is, until we reached #1 in finance. After a few days sitting in the top spot, Apple (<3) featured our app in its ‘What’s Hot’ section. Sales went up dramatically.
BillMinder sold an average of 100 copies a day. New releases and market fluctuations would vary that number slightly, but it never reached much higher than 200 sales on it’s best days. Then 2.0 was released. Our sales quickly increased to near 400/day (our highest yet) before falling back near 200. We assumed that sales would probably settle around that point (assuming we could hold #1) and we were very happy with this as it was nearly double our average. Then we magically appeared under ‘What’s Hot’ and, well, the graph says the rest. Thanks, Apple.
BillMinder Sales Over the Past Month
BillMinder has been our most popular application and, as such, as received the vast majority of our development time. Our SVN repository currently sits at 729 revisions and continues to grow daily. It easily includes literally hundreds of engineering hours and significant investment in design. We’ve released 13 updates and are working on update 14 now, as well as much more coming in the near future (including a companion app). We hope you like BillMinder as much as we do!