If membership isn’t scarce, the membership loses its signal message. The same applies to physical products: Apple will never offer a cheap iPhone to compete with low-end Android devices – it would destroy the company’s signal message that the iPhone is a luxury product.

The app that comes closest to a luxury service that I can think of is Superhuman, which charges its users $30 a month for an email client (which you could also get for free by just using Gmail). But there’s a difference to other software products: Superhuman has signal distribution built in. Every time you send an email via Superhuman, your recipient will notice a little “Sent via Superhuman” in your signature.

Another point of evidence is the lack of luxury software products. People spend absurd amounts of money on jewellery, handbags and cars, but I can’t think of a piece of software with an even remotely similar price tag. Sure, people have tried to sell $999 apps but those never took off.