I have priced it to be the best possible value for money.
Muse is a one man effort. Musements is me (full time) and my daughter (who is a student). My overhead costs are very small indeed and this allows me to charge a price that a larger company could not possibly match.
Muse began in earnest when I bought a music editor (at considerably higher cost) and attempted to use it. It was a frustrating experience. I decided to write my own!
I spent five years as a Microsoft developer working on Windows NT and Windows 95. My contract with Microsoft forbad me from competing with Microsoft and the definition of competition was very broad indeed. Muse continued to grow. Incidentally, it was used as an unofficial test case for pre-beta versions of both operating systems and found a few bugs. When I found one I then had to invent "three line" programs that would reproduce the bugs to allow me to report the bug without giving Microsoft the source code to Muse.
The long period of development meant firstly that over the years much more function was added, so that it is a full scale music editor. It prints, it plays, it reads files in three different formats, and writes files in about five, it has grace notes, it has ornaments, it has four clefs, it transposes, it does tablature and converts both ways, it supports non-standard tunings, it understands ABC...
Secondly it meant that I had time to change my mind about some poor features and re-do them. On a money-driven, short development cycle they would never have been re-done.
Thirdly, because I was not relying on Muse to pay the groceries during any of this time (I'm still not), my development costs that I really need to recoup are essentially nil. (My wife would like to see the price of the new computer paid back, but we're not starving). This is why Muse is such exceptional value for money.
Muse is still improving. Because I use it myself I feel the pain when things don't work. The way that Muse licencing is implemented means that if you register a copy of Muse and then download a fresh copy onto the same computer (i.e. an upgrade), the upgrade will be already registered. No need to pay more, it's all automatic.
Having said all that, under some pressure from my wife and
family and urged on by customers who called it "ridiculously
underpriced", the price is now 20 pounds (it started at 10).
Since it first started selling at a tenner, a huge amount of new
function has been added (and a few bugs fixed) so that it is does
more, is easier to use, is more reliable and produces a better looking result.
It is still very cheap for what you get. If you want to
use it on more than one computer then it's 10 pounds extra for
each other computer. (This includes the case of buying another
computer and transferring Muse to that, so if you buy a new
computer every two years, Muse might cost you about 10 pence a week).