Sincerely Launching An iOS Photo App Monetization Platform: Picture Printing For All

You may recall that back in April, Postagram launched as a way to transform your Instagrams into physical picture postcards and deliver them for $0.99. A few month later, PopBooth launched as a way to use your iPhone/iPad as a photo booth complete with the picture print outs. These apps, while great themselves, were tests for Sincerely’s platform. A platform which today they’re opening to all iOS developers.

The Sincerely Ship Library is built from the tools the company was using internally to build apps like Postagram and PopBooth. Once developers sign up, they can add print and ship capabilities to their photo apps in under an hour, Sincerely notes. Those developers will be able to utilize Sincerely’s printing network as well as user network (for connections already established through Postagram and/or PopBooth). The result is 4×6 300 dpi color postcards from any iOS app that can be sent anywhere.

Okay, that’s nice, but why should developers sign up for this? Because it’s also a potential monetization platform. Sincerely asks that developers place a minimum $0.99 fee on the images. But for anything above $0.99, Sincerely pays 70 percent back to the app developer. Sincerely obviously keeps the other 30 percent — the same split Apple themselves do with developers.

So if a developer decides to charge $1.99 for their in-app photos, they would keep $0.70 of that (again, the developer keeps 70 percent after the initial $0.99 threshold).

For this fee, Sincerely handles all the billing and address collection as well as the actual logistics of printing and delivering the photos. They also handle the customer support surrounding the entire process. And the platform allows developers to have a branded space on the actual photo printouts.

Developers can sign up for the Sincerely Ship Library starting today, and the plan is for the platform to go fully live in September. The company is also sponsoring the Photo Hack Day in New York this weekend — the winner of which will get some nice iGear and a featured spot when the Ship Library launches.

Given the huge amount of photo apps flooding the market (with more to come), this seems like a smart idea. My only question is whether or not the payout to developers will be enough? Many will be hard-pressed to charge more then $1.99 for the functionality, and some will probably want to use the $0.99 price that Postagram itself uses — but then they’d make no money.

Even still, it’s not like it will cost developers anything to implement Sincerely’s solution. And they get to offer this functionality to users in a simple way.

Below, find some pictures of what the implementation looks like for app developers.

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