I bought DL2 on the app store, can I upgrade to DL3 with a reduced price?

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When DL3 was first released, we offered an "unofficial upgrade path" for customers who buy directly from us.

We're very sorry not to be able to offer upgrade pricing for DL3 for our loyal DL2 users via the App Store, which doesn't recognize upgrade pricing. Until they do, the compromise we've made is selling DL3 at our upgrade price ($25) rather than its retail value ($40) to all customers, old and new. Although this is obviously advantageous to new users, it's also understandably galling to those who have been with us for years. We hope Apple will allow us to tier our prices in the future.

I'd say galling is a good word for it, but it's not about Apple, now, is it?.

I bought licenses for both 1 and 2 directly, and now you expect us to pay full price, the same as first-time purchasers. The app store makes for a convenient excuse, but the reality is that if the developer wanted to offer upgrade pricing to direct customers then he could do that easily enough. The ones I really feel sorry for are the poor schmucks who bought DL2 a few days or weeks before DL3.

Here's the other thing... the days of monster prices for little consumer utility apps are over. There are multitudes of of seriously excellent apps on the app store for .99 - 9.99, and many free ones as well (Evernote, Wunderlist, Adium, SuperDuper, etc).

So presenting it as if only another $25 on top of the monster bucks we've already shelled out is some kind of giveaway is a bit insulting to our intelligence.

I'm sure if you offered this app at $10 you'd sell at least 10X the number of copies, maybe even a hundred or a thousand X. You do the math! That's how the sorfware biz works in 2014. Thinking you'll make more by extracting a big price for each copy is laughable!

As for the unofficial upgrade path offered at first- pfffffft! I can't say it didn't happen but I do know that I didn't get the memo despite being registered with a valid email address. I think I'll pass on the pricy apps from here on out unless it's in way critical to my work or life-- and this one isn't. I'm going to keep using DL2 until such time as the upgrade price looks attractive.

I'm not presenting the reduced price as a "giveaway," just a compromise. Twenty-five bucks is not free! We don't have any way to retrieve who purchased DL2 from the MAS. The options were to disadvantage our MAS customers, which would naturally damage our MAS star rating (the factor that most impacts our sales), or offer the same price to all customers both new and returning. We went with the latter.

The "unofficial upgrade path" deal predates my time at the company, but the reason I know about it is because I have access to the standardized email responses sent out by previous support staff. When DL3 was introduced, every DL2 customer who inquired about upgrade pricing was offered the deal. I'm almost certain it was announced on the forums -- I can't narrow GS's search results to the point where I can find it, though. It wasn't a state secret -- evidently Loan knew about it. I'm sorry you missed out.

I can "do the math," but the math isn't meaningful if it's based on purely speculative figures. Where does your surety that we could sell ten times as many copies at $10 come from? What's your expertise in the market? (Serious question, not posed sarcastically. I don't know how much credence to give an anonymous commenter, but if you're in the industry, this is a conversation I'd like to have.)

Salparadise you need to get over it and stop being a douchebag. Software development is by no means trivial and 25 bucks is practically nothing for an application that provides this much value. LMAO @ "monster" prices. Just STFU.

Update: Ok, deviating from the original topic somewhat, but I ponied up for DL3 because scanning with the computer's camera was painful and time-consuming. I hadn't added new items in a long time. The iPhone scanner is slick and worked great. It crashed several times, but didn't lose any data. So after struggling with DL3 for awhile I discovered, as many others have, that I just prefer DL2. I want the interface and functionality that went missing in DL3. The pop-up detail window doesn't compete with the right DL2 sidebar that displays data automatically.

So after several failed attempts to export a text file and import my updated DL3 database into DL2, I finally figured it out how to do it. Here's the procedure for enjoying the best of both...

1. Scan new stuff in DL3 with iPhone camera (you have to pay $25 to scan more than twenty-five items). 2. Export to a DL1 database on the desktop. 3. Quit DL3 and remove all versions of Delicious Library (~Library/Application Support/Delicious Library) and replace with the DL1version you just exported. 4. Open with DL1 and make sure it's displaying exported database (perhaps this step is unnecessary, but I did it to verify the export). Use Command-R to refresh data- give it some time and check details. 5. Quit DL1 and open DL2. DL2 will convert the DL1 database to DL2. You should now have all the new items and data displaying perfectly in DL2 and you can browse your collection comfortably.

Just don't make the mistake of opening DL3––probably a good idea to copy the updated DL2 library to a different location for safekeeping, just in case you inadvertently open DL3 and convert it. Trash the older versions so you don't get them mixed up. Copy the procedure to a text file. The next time you need to add new items to the database, open DL3, use the iPhone scanner to add new items, then repeat this procedure to get back to DL2.

I hope to see future improvements to DL3 that will make it decidedly better than DL2, but in the meantime I am just going to try and not fret the extra work and expense that is required to make use of the iPhone scanner... which is really nice.