I also feel this way. For some reasons, I think my natural, quick feeling toward that would be that paying 1.99$ 'seems' more of an annoyance than paying 0$, and since it's not enough to be deemed worth the annoyance, I can picture myself putting 0$ instead of 1.99$.

For the same products, I feel I wouldn't change the price if it was listed at {3,4,5}.99$, I don't really know why. 1.99$ feels too close to an transaction fee, or some kind of things like that that feels like the money will be lost in The System. While paying >3.99$ seems to have more consistence, more purpose, since my intuition tells me that more of the value will end up in the proper pockets.

That's a very subjective take on this, but I support your idea that more people might have paid if the default would have been 3.99$.

Agreed. I considered having it show various different values at random to do testing on the payments received when users are presented with them, but honestly there just wasn't enough data to pull that off and make it worthwhile. I think my total sales were <40 (downloads were in the tens of thousands, IIRC).

I would be interested to see data from the Humble Bundles on pay-what-you-want pricing. They seem to have done things over the past few sales that have resulted in higher averages.

The biggest thing is that many of the products are not unlockable unless you pay over the average, so the average is always trending slightly up more than other pay-what-you-want models. High incentive to fork over a few more dollars.

Even if it increased the number of people paying the original listed price ($3.99) in this case to slightly >70% they would still gain less money than $5 and it would not have seemed as clean. In either case, I find it more interesting that so many people would pay money when they are not required.

Apparently even people "against humanity" still have a sense of justice.