Since we began the discussion about selling our tools for Radio UserLand, what I have been hearing both internally and externally is that "they should cost less than Radio".

At first it made sense to me too, why would anybody pay more for something that is something like a plug-in than the application itself.

Thinking about it, let's try to see this differently: let's say that Radio UserLand is not just an application, but it is something like an operating system. From many points of view, this is what it is, it has APIs to link to, it provides lots of basic features, but it can also be extended to do a lot of other interesting stuff. With Frontier, it's a platform upon many smart developers have started building on.

Now, if considered from this POV, application running on an OS do not necessarily need to cost less than the OS itself, to the contrary, they usually cost more.

This is not to say that we want to charge more on our tools, we have not decided yet, and if people thinks of a price as "appropriate", it's hard to change that feeling just using different metaphores. But still, I don't think that there necessaily need to be such a strict relation between the cost of the platform and the cost of the application.