![\"coffee_-_spend_money_on_apps.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/cdn2.hubspot.net\/hubfs\/435306\/images\/coffee_-_spend_money_on_apps.jpg\")
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My father-in-law goes to Tim Horton\u2019s on his way to work every day. His morning ritual includes a hot double-double (our Canadian friends knows what this means) before he starts his day. Every day, he spends a couple bucks, give or take, on coffee. As I was talking to him about some of the app projects we are building, he told me that he never pays for apps. I was immediately struck by the thought process here. The value in his daily coffee was worth the money, but the value in a paid app versus a free app was not.<\/p>\n
I think this mentality is widely prevalent in our culture and around the globe. People don\u2019t think there is a need to pay for an app when you can use it for free. Paid apps often are received very poorly and people opt to continue using free versions that are bombarded by ads. Data shows the number of\u00a0free mobile app downloads was close to 93 billion<\/a>\u00a0versus 9 billion paid downloads. Despite this mentality, worldwide mobile app revenue continues to grow. In 2011, it was $8 billion in revenue and is\u00a0projected to eclipse $76 billion<\/a>\u00a0by 2017. While mobile app revenue has grown, the percentage of\u00a0paid app revenue is expected to fall<\/a>\u00a0based on a 2011 to 2017 projection. Forbes explains this mentality as\u00a0anchoring<\/a>, which simply means that people have implicit expectations on what things should cost and don\u2019t want to pay any more than they think something is worth.<\/p>\n