FreeAppAlert Notifies You When For-Pay iPhone Apps Become Free
iPhone: There are thousands and thousands of iPhone applications, but you hardly have time to keep up with their pricing changes, let alone new releases. The FreeAppAlert web service will keep you updated.
Context & Ripple Effects
FreeAppAlert arrives into a market already obsessed with App Store pricing. Coverage through late 2008 and early 2009 framed a race to the bottom: the myth of the 99-cent killer app argued that rock-bottom pricing was a trap for developers, and by February Silicon Alley Insider was reporting that iPhone app prices were tanking outright.
Against that backdrop, a free web service that surfaces temporary price drops makes sense as infrastructure for buyers rather than sellers — with tens of thousands of apps repricing constantly, individual users cannot track it themselves. It also sits near the piracy question raised when pirates boarded Apple's App Store in March: if legitimate apps keep dipping to zero, one incentive to sideload shrinks.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners get a passive way to catch limited-time giveaways they would otherwise miss, converting the store's chaotic repricing into an alert feed.
- Developers running free promotions gain an unofficial discovery channel: a price drop now propagates to an audience of deal-seekers without Apple's storefront surfacing it.
Second-order effects
- Price-dump marketing becomes more effective, reinforcing the very race to the bottom that the 99-cent-killer-app argument warned about — developers get more reward for temporary freebies relative to steady paid sales.
- Aggregator-style tracking invites copycats, pushing App Store deal discovery toward a layer of third-party services sitting outside Apple's own ranking and merchandising.
Third-order effects
- If promotional repricing keeps working as user acquisition, the App Store settles into a freemium-and-promo economy where the sticker price is a marketing lever rather than the revenue line — a structure Apple's own storefront tools never fully absorbed.
The trend: App Store pricing is shifting from fixed shelf prices to dynamic, promotion-driven economics, with third-party trackers arbitraging the gap between what Apple surfaces and what users pay.