Good morning / afternoon / evening! (delete as appropriate)
Those of you with a keen eye will have noticed that TypeIt4Me 7 is still available to purchase at the low price of £9.99 / 9,99€ / $9.99 (USD.) This despite our initial announcement indicating that the flash sale would end on May 1st. How come? The reason is Riccardo and I are a couple of soft touches, with all the business acumen of a bowl of gnocchi. There are many of you out there who were very distraught at having missed the deadline, so we’ve restarted the sale and extended it to the end of May.
The Best Laid Plans…
Our motives for reverting to the lower price are, in fact, twofold. First, it was brought to our attention that for reasons unknown (ahem) the discounted TypeIt4Me 7 launch sale price automatically ended a few hours too soon in some time zones. In all likelihood, this was down to an oversight and/or input error on our part. Mea culpa. Riccardo is laser focused on coding and debugging and his idiot failson is currently knackered. Haste, fatigue and sleep deprivation have a way of leading to slip-ups – especially, it would appear, when I’m using Apple’s scheduling tools to co-ordinate automated regional price changes on the Mac App Store. So…apologies from London, England to everyone in remote Alaska, Hawaii and similarly exotic lands – we do still love you.
Further to this administrative cock-up, in the hours immediately following the actual intended cutoff we woke up to a flurry of messages from latecomers who’d missed out on the deal, pleading for clemency. By the time we’d opened the 5th impassioned Puss-in-Boots email lobbying us for a teensy-weensy extension of the sale the realisation set in that we really hadn’t been generous enough. We were left feeling like downright grubby capitalists. So, we concluded the best remedial solution would be to start the flash sale up again and let it run for longer. If you thought you’d missed the boat, don’t despair: you now have an extra month to climb aboard. We want to give everyone a chance to get involved without raiding the piggy bank.
Upgrades? Sidegrades? Crossgrades? Alas, the Mac App Store is Built Different.
On a related matter, another question that’s come up a lot concerns upgrades. Many have asked us if it is or will be possible to upgrade to TypeIt4Me version 7 at a special discounted price just for existing customers. The answer is no…and while we have your attention we’d like to take this opportunity to explain the situation. In short: to free ourselves from the extra admin that direct sale involves, we made TypeIt4Me 7 available only on the Mac App Store – and regrettably, upgrade pricing is not an option there.
When we sold a licence-based version of TypeIt4Me directly through our website, we were able to operate a generous upgrade discount policy. It was often a headache for us to manage, but anyone in our database could update to the latest major version for under a tenner, no matter how long ago they last paid for TypeIt4Me. This would stretch back decades to much older versions, in some cases.
For better or worse (OK, worse), that’s not possible on the Mac App Store, which is an outlet owned and operated by Apple, the new, exclusive vendor of TypeIt4Me. Apple doesn’t share customer details with us and also doesn’t know who has previously paid us directly in the past for a different version. There is no mechanism provided to us to offer selective discounts to customers who fall into this category, so…
…Discounts for Everyone!
With those considerations in mind we decided to take a hit to our bottom line and offer a hefty, flat discount to everyone when our major new update launched. This was the simplest way we could think of to give existing users of older versions a window to update to version 7 without paying full whack again.
It’s clear now the biggest flaw in this plan was our failure to take into account that not everyone pays attention to our business. Most people of sound mind have better things to do with their time than scour their Junk folders for comically inept marketing emails from us. It’s likely they also don’t obsessively refresh this blog at regular intervals looking for bargains. That’s why we’ve extended the flash sale for a whole month: to give everyone a fair chance to notice TypeIt4Me 7 is out now and get up to speed.
Slipped Between the Cracks? Get in Touch!
Did you pay more than £9.99 / 9,99€ / $9.99 (USD) for TypeIt4Me yesterday? Don’t worry, we’ve got you. Anyone who purchased TypeIt4Me 7 during the brief period yesterday (May 1st) when it reverted to full price ($29.99 USD) is welcome to contact us for compensation. If you forward us your receipt from Apple, we will happily issue you with a redeemable $20 (USD) App Store gift card to cover the difference in price.
That’s all we have to share with you for now. We’ll come back to you soon once we have news on the TypeIt4Me 7.0.1 bug fix update. At the time of writing, this is currently still lost in the Bermuda Triangle of Apple’s App Store review process, awaiting approval. We are unable to release it until Apple gives us the green light. Thanks for bearing with us while we attempt to move things along and get the update into the Mac App Store to fix issues you’ve reported.
