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Thanks for your comment, as always, we love to hear feedback from our reviews!! I frame the following response from the perspective of an iPhone user. One of the reasons I started this website was because no one was doing objective reviews of medical apps and I was picking apps based on trial and error. I knew a lot of the comments on iTunes aren’t objective, as my developer friends have told me they give away promotional codes for good reviews in the App Store.

1) We understand that designing an application by yourself takes hard work. Also, if you’re paying someone to design an application it can be costly. We especially admire developers who work by themselves to produce medical apps, such as yourself and many more.

2) It makes a HUGE different what the price of an application is, at least to our readers. When you are buying a product, and you are reading reviews for the product, you are going to naturally compare the prices. You are going to buy the product that gives you the best benefit for the cost. Even though a product might be great, you’re not going to buy it if the price does not deliver a huge benefit. Why would I buy a $50 well written medical pamphlet that contains only 15 pages of material?

3) Dr. Wodajo’s review echoed what what we heard from our colleges, in terms of the price. I showed this app to multiple medical students, residents, and even a rad/onc fellow and allowed them to try it out. The main issue almost every person complained about was the large cost vs the benefit. The purpose of our site is to provide objective reviews, and enable our readers to have an insight to a product before they actually buy it. Excluding the multiple complaints about the high price that we received from people in the medical field would be disingenuous of us, and thats not what this site stands for.

4) I also understand the supply and demand aspect of pricing, I was a finance major in undergrad and was pre-med at the same time. We’re not interested in supply and demand curves and price points, but if you use this argument it’s hard to transfer to this case. One of the issues is that the end consumer does not get a chance the “try” out the application. You either buy it or you don’t. If you don’t like it, your loss, no refunds. So I can walk into a bookstore to compare medical textbooks, but you can’t do this with the App Store.

5) Most medical students and residents have enormous debt, and are careful on how they spend their money (I’m one of them). These two classes have tight budgets so informing them of costs vs. benefits of an application is absolutely critical, especially when they are using loan money.

6) We’ve reviewed plenty of expensive apps that we absolutely loved, and in the same way we steer people away from over-priced apps, we steer people towards expensive apps that are great to use and worth the cost.

At the end of the day we just want our readers to be able to make the best decision based on objective opinions and reviews, if that makes us the “price police”, then all reviewers can be called that, and so be it. Avoiding price vs. benefit issues would not be doing a complete objective review, and I have yet to read an objective review of any sort of product or service where these pricing issues have been ignored.

Again, thanks so much for your comments!! I’d encourage our readers to check out our review of Dr. Joslin’s app, the Joslin Chest Atlas, we definitely liked his app!

-Iltifat Husain

MD/MPH student, MS 4

Editor, iphonemedicalappreview.com

I don’t know the circumstances of this app, but designing, gathering hard data for, and then developing an app takes an enormous amount of work. I know because I’ve done it (Joslin Chest Atlas)!

What difference does it make if someone creates an app that makes a fart noise and sells it for 99 cents? Why does that create some sort of perceived benchmark for how apps should be priced?

The appropriate price for an app is a multifactorial decision involving the time spent creating it, the estimated sales volume, the perceived value, and most importantly, what the market will tolerate.

If people are buying it, then good for the developer. If they aren’t buying it, the developer will reduce the price soon enough.

Since when do we need price police?