Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

Raising prices, especially for B2B, is almost always the right thing to do. People used to chuckle at my pricing, which made them think I wasn’t serious. Until people start complaining about the price, it needs to go higher. You are probably providing much more value to people than you realize.

Supporting USB enumeration and reads/writes to arbitrary endpoints on windows took an act of god, maybe 200-300 hours of work to get it working similar to node-usb (libusb) on macOS (which maybe only took 100 hours). I’m probably underestimating hours by a factor of 2 or 3. Early pandemic time/math is fuzzy.

Managing 10+ levels of JS promise chains can be a chore if not architected and named properly. Or worse, when you write a feature that’s close to the user and realize it requires asynch all the way back up through 10+ sync calls so now it’s refactoring across 30 files and you forget one edge case that doesn’t resolve/throw and it takes days to track it down. Normal solo project problems.

Integrating fabricJS with a custom wasm module to dither images. That was a 10x speed improvement but took a few hundred hours.

Early on I chose react/flow/redux/immutable/semantic-UI as my front-end “stack” and it’s been mostly good to me. Of course, I wish my codebase was all perfect typescript but eventually I’ll get there.

The node ABI changes over the years has really stressed me out. It seems like it breaks all the native code every 3 months. Ugh!

Customer support has been delightful. Out of a few thousand emails only 2 or 3 have been awful. Sometimes I’ll get an email at 2pm on a Sunday saying “I have to print 5,000 labels by Monday morning or else I’m fired!” and we are always successful. That feels good. The toll free number on the website rings my cell and sometimes I wake up to missed calls from Nigeria or UAE and I think that’s pretty special. Call volume has not been overwhelming. Thank god.

Marketing is a huge chore and I mostly disdain it.

> * B2B in a niche market

> * Some viral component so you do not have to spend money on ads for growth.

Indeed. For years our sales department was simply our customers. They'd call their friends and tell them they need to get our software, or when they switched jobs they'd work hard to get our software used at the new place.

Now we have a small but proper sales team. However word of mouth got us very, very far.

> * Sold as a subscription and only as a subscription.

This was a key point my boss realized early on as well. It's much easier for the accounting department to handle a fixed recurring cost, than a bi-annual huge expense or similar.

It also allows you to incorporate usage into the price, so the price scales with the customers' income, not unlike cloud offerings.

We have a small fixed monthly cost, and a variable cost (per invoice/order essentially). The variable price depends on volume, but it's very predicable and makes it so the customer doesn't have to worry too much if business is slow for a while.

I am looking forward for the upcoming release of WiseJ 3.

WiseJ is a drop-in replacement for WinForms apps, to make those run in a browser.

The WiseJ 2.5 is yet on .NET 4.8, but the new WiseJ 3, planned for March, is running on .NET Core.

The key features for me are: (1) all the wiring is hidden, so no need do not deal with Javascript. All processing is done in server. (2) Refreshing the browser by pressing F5 keeps user's session. (3) Background tasks work seamlessly with UI updates. (4) Can use System.Drawing.

It is a paid library, but very reasonable price.