MacHeist draws a lot of opinions. Here’s one of them. It made me curious. What kind of deal do the developers really get? MacHeist doesn’t publish the numbers because different developers get different deals. Apparently some developers get a flat fee and others get a percentage. So let’s make some quick estimates.

Let’s assume that MacHeist will make $1,000,000 in sales in 14 days. We know that one quarter of the sales go to charity. Let’s assume that the developers get half of the sales, that’s $500,000. There are 31 apps, 12 in the bundle and 19 free apps. We’ll further assume that the bundle apps take the lion’s share of the profits, two thirds, or $335,000. If it were split evenly that would be approximately $28,000 per app. Some are probably cheaper, let’s say $15,000, some are higher, let’s say $40,000.

And now you start to see why the developers might be interested. And the reality is that the vast majority of the purchases will never be used or used only a few times.

This is why it doesn’t make sense to me to be irate over the bundle. The developers are all intelligent people. They know what their normal sales rate is and they know what their expected income from the bundle is. It’s a simple equation.