Don't sell things for a dollar, unless it's on the app store.
If you're selling something for a dollar rather than providing it for free you've already convinced someone to get out their wallet and buy it. That's not an insignificant achievement. That person is very likely willing to pay something like $5 instead for the exact same product. Even if they aren't, you can make more money selling one $5 item than 5 $1 items, so you can get by with 5x fewer customers.
This idea reminds me of Netflix password sharing crackdown. If they pissed off the majority of their password-sharing customers and they canceled, they still end out on top because the remaining customers convert. E.g., you've got 5 customers all sharing one account. Three out of five of them are annoyed and stop watching Netflix entirely. The two remaining have to buy themselves individual accounts. In this made-up scenario, Netflix doubled their revenue while shedding more than half of their customers.
I think it's possible that you don't want the customer that is barely willing to spend a dollar on you, someone who might not even be happy with your product because they can barely justify it in the first place, You want the customer who loves your product enough to give you $5 or $10.
There's also a price signaling argument: when you price your product at $1, you're telling people that it's barely worth anything. If Starbucks sold you a coffee for $1, that would tell you that it can't possibly be very good coffee.
Why not charge $20. You only need one out of 20 people. Or 50, 5000, 5,000,000. There are ceilings and ranges to what someone will pay. Would you pay $5 dollars for a newspaper? You might pay a dollar. Would you pay $5 to make a payphone call? You might pay a dollar.
To me, selling for $2 or $3 or $5 might be a better business model. You’ll make more money from fewer customers (less costumer support) and reduce the overhead of fees.
At the very least, the price should reflect costs. At best, you charge for value.
Price segments markets. Segmenting for people who will spend money is a better strategy than trying to sell to people who won’t.
You have asked for minimum development work so ...
"Write your email address legibly on a piece of paper and mail it with a US $1 bill to $ADDRESS."
Obviously 1) it will cost people 68¢ for a stamp, 2) won't really work for people outside the USA and 3) if you only sell fifty copies it's not a wildly silly suggestion.
Is there any reason there is not a popular micropayments solution i.e. <= $1?
It seems like there’s plenty of use cases but I’m not aware of any popular platforms that make it feasible with their fees. I assume there are a bunch of costs associated with processing those cc payments but surely they aren’t large enough to make in infeasible to process small payments.
One micro-transaction doesn't need to imply one credit card transaction. A micropayments solution could work like PayPal, whereby every user has a balance. Then it's just database transactions within their own system.
The tricky part is the chicken-egg problem; does user adoption or developer adoption come first? I expect that one of the existing major tech companies would need to do it.
Apple, Google, Microsoft: Can build it into their browser, and are already facilitating payments via their app stores and existing user accounts.
Stripe: Already have the developer adoption in Stripe checkout.
The limiting factor might be CS & disputes. There is an average support cost of transactions, and it might be higher than what they could make on fees. I think some automation could bring that cost down in the future as well, though.
As a developer that is the worst price model to be in. If you don’t use a stores like Apple Store. The issue is state taxes. Some states require to file taxes when you reach N amount of sold good in USD. But some actually for number of transactions. Like 100-1000. So imagine if you sold 100 for $100 now you have to spend all of those money to figure out taxes situation in that state.
How many do you plan on selling?
Only way to avoid high processing fees is to get a merchant account and use product links from a virtual terminal that supports it.
I can help with that but might not be worth it if you are not making more than $500/m
If you're selling something for a dollar rather than providing it for free you've already convinced someone to get out their wallet and buy it. That's not an insignificant achievement. That person is very likely willing to pay something like $5 instead for the exact same product. Even if they aren't, you can make more money selling one $5 item than 5 $1 items, so you can get by with 5x fewer customers.
This idea reminds me of Netflix password sharing crackdown. If they pissed off the majority of their password-sharing customers and they canceled, they still end out on top because the remaining customers convert. E.g., you've got 5 customers all sharing one account. Three out of five of them are annoyed and stop watching Netflix entirely. The two remaining have to buy themselves individual accounts. In this made-up scenario, Netflix doubled their revenue while shedding more than half of their customers.
I think it's possible that you don't want the customer that is barely willing to spend a dollar on you, someone who might not even be happy with your product because they can barely justify it in the first place, You want the customer who loves your product enough to give you $5 or $10.
There's also a price signaling argument: when you price your product at $1, you're telling people that it's barely worth anything. If Starbucks sold you a coffee for $1, that would tell you that it can't possibly be very good coffee.