Paper app now free

Fiftythree’s lovely & opinionated sketching app Paper is now completely free to use—no more in-app purchases. The company plans to make its money selling hardware:

“We want to make the complete Paper experience accessible to as many people as possible, and the global success of Pencil is enabling this,” says [founder Georg] Petschnigg. “Pencil’s sales have been fantastic — the walnut version sold out within weeks of launch, and one year later, Pencil remains the top­-selling digital stylus internationally.”

More jaundiced take: No matter how good your creative app is, if it runs on a mobile OS, people just aren’t going to pay for it. They’ll drop 30 bucks on an iPhone case or 40 on an iPad cover, but even $5-10 for beautiful software? That’s “pricey.” (See also people buying $700 telephones every two years but balking at paying even $1/mo. to protect their lifetimes’ worth of photos—this despite the fact that people run out of burning buildings with just their kids & photo albums. So weird.)

One thought on “Paper app now free

  1. Where can I protect my lifetimes’ worth of photos for $1/mo? I’d do it if I knew.

    [iCloud will give you 20GB of storage for that price. Google will give you 15GB for free. —J.]

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