Corvus Consulting » charity http://corvusconsulting.ca Home of Todd Sieling's product design and strategy services for the web. Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:34:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Why I Paid $25 for a $12 App http://corvusconsulting.ca/2009/04/why-i-paid-25-for-a-12-app/ http://corvusconsulting.ca/2009/04/why-i-paid-25-for-a-12-app/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:10:00 +0000 Todd http://corvusconsulting.ca/?p=580 Have you visited Twistori.com? If not, do so only with a few minutes to let slip away to wherever minutes go while we’re pleasantly distracted. Simply put, Twistori is a keyword browser that sits on top of Twitter posts, presenting what it finds in way not unlike watching water flow by in a stream; it’s somehow engaging, every changing, and meditative at the same time.

I liked, but often forgot about the Twistori website in moments that would have been perfect for it, so finding that a desktop app for Mac had been launched into beta was welcome news. While in beta, a license for Twistori Desktop can be had for just $12 (after beta, the price goes up to $16), and that sounded good to me but I recoiled at the only payment option: Google Checkout. And that’s how $12 started to turn into $25…

I hadn’t heard great things about Checkout, most notably in a post by Amy Hoy, who happens to have a hand in Twistori Desktop’s creation.

That spot of irony aside, I keep the number of agents authorized to charge my credit card understandably small, and wasn’t ready to add Google Checkout to that list. I wrote the developers and asked if there were another way. The reply:

We understand that you may not want to, or may be unable to use Google Checkout to purchase Twistori Desktop. We actually understand. Although we can’t currently accept PayPal, we have a solution!

Please pick from one of the charities below, and donate at least $12 (the price of a copy of Twistori Desktop) to it. If you can, mention “IndyHall Labs” in your donation so that we can track donations made in the name of our software. Pass the receipt along to us, and we’ll send you a copy of Twistori Desktop!

The Mara Triangle on WildlifeDirect
http://maratriangle.wildlifedirect.org/
Operation Smile
http://www.operationsmile.org/
PhilAbundance
http://www.philabundance.org/

Triple win? I’m sold. So sold, and a bit moved, that I rounded my donation to Operation Smile up to $25, and sent the receipt to IndyHall Labs with a question about how this beautiful solution came about.

The idea began when one of the founders of IndyHall Labs, Jason Allum, first developed RipIt (http://ripitapp.com). To solve the issue, he started having people donate to PhilAbundance (one of the charities we list) and since then, all the products developed at IndyHall Labs follow a similar model. We’ve actually raised a decent amount of money for charities since we started taking PayPal orders this way a few short months ago.

Few are willing to give up cash flow to put a customer at ease and at the same time bring them into doing good in the world. The folks behind IndyHall Labs are, and it says a lot about what a true innovation looks like.

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