Is it time to start factoring data into cost of app ownership?

Right now, smartphone users compare the relative cost of their apps by their price, a reasonable measure. But with data caps looming and unlimited plans fading away, the better measure would be total cost of ownership, which factors in not only price, but more importantly, data usage, suggests InkWire, which makes a news aggregator app.

The company did an analysis comparing the total cost of ownership between individual publisher apps and aggregation apps like Reeder, Pulse and Yahoo. Surprise: InkWire, which has a vested interest in this study, found that it’s more economical to buy a reader app that pulls from various sources than hitting up single-source apps, even when aggregation apps initially cost more.

By looking at the average price of the apps amortized over 18 months, and then factoring in the average monthly cost of bandwidth for mobile users and the average amount of data usage per month (about 126 MB), InkWire found that the average data costs for an aggregator app were about $2.73 a month. Assuming that users visit multiple single-source publishing apps to get the same info they can find in one aggregator, the cost of reading apps dedicated to a single source was about $7.94 a month, based on InkWire’s modest assumption that one aggregating app can replace three single-source apps.