Several weeks ago we’ve removed all the account refill options for AdDuplex campaigns that were below $1,000. Since then several emails have reached us with a general gist of us ignoring smaller developers. This is peculiar because the change was primarily driven by the fact that small indie developers are who we care about the most. Let me explain our reasoning…

Paid user acquisition is not cheap

Any paid user acquisition activity comes with the price you have to pay for an average user that you get. It could be anywhere from a few cents to tens or even hundreds of dollars in unsuccessful attempts. From our own experience promoting AppRaisin on AdDuplex the numbers were between $0.16 and $3.45 depending on the platform and targeting options. So, in the best case scenario $50 would buy you around 300 users. And in the average case the number would be closer to 50. Considering that those spending $50-100 on advertising would likely be first-time advertisers without extensive experience optimizing the campaign for better results, I’d venture a guess that your number will be closer to 10.

If $50 is all you have for paid user acquisition, we don’t want to take advantage of you and take your hard earned money for a hardly tangible return. As we care about your success as an indie or hobbyist developer, we encourage you to use the cross-promotion part of AdDuplex or, say, participate in the Microsoft TechRewards program and redeem smaller AdDuplex coupons for the points you earn there. And you are better off spending that $50 on improving the app in some meaningful way.

On the other hand, if your advertising budget is big enough to make a reasonable impact on your download numbers, we don’t want to force you to spend a $50-100 to test AdDuplex before launching a full-blown campaign. In this case we invite you to email us at sales@adduplex.com and we will give you a free trial run.

Does this make sense? Please let us know what you think in the comments below or over the email.