Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#311

Post by hermitcrab » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #297

hermitcrab wrote: post #79

I been making a full-time living since 2005 selling software written in C++/Qt for Window and Mac. My latest product is a drag and drop tool for data transformation (merge, split, clean, dedupe etc): https://www.easydatatransform.com Things have mostly moved to web, but desktop apps still have major advantages in some areas: -less latency -data kept locally -better development tools

This looks great! I think you've got one more customer. What did you use to build it?

Thanks. Qt and C++. The Excel I/O uses the LibXL library.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#312

Post by ziml77 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #254

eps wrote: post #8

Plenty of people do this. Go onto any software listing site (eg. Softpedia or AlternativeTo), pick a not-a-brandname commercial product and chances are that it will be a single-person project. From things that are really well-polished and look like a team effort to pimped-up crappy weekend projects. Lots and lots are made and run by a single individual. Whether they sell well is an altogether different question, but…

There are a lot of shareware or shareware-like desktop Mac apps that I have been relying on for many years. The programs continue to be updated regularly and don’t seem to be hobby projects, so I assume the developers are supporting themselves. Some are sold through Apple’s App Store, and some are sold directly by the developer. Here are the ones that I use most and the companies that develop them: Fission; Audio Hij…

MacOS seems to be a good place to be if you're making paid desktop software. There's a lot of Windows utilities that are freeware and of course Linux is loaded with FOSS.

I only run macOS on my laptop and yet it's where I've spent the most money on various utilities.

MacOS-only software I've paid for: Bartender, BetterTouchTool, Forklift, SoundSource, Pixelmator Pro, iStat Menus, Nova, Alfred, DaisyDisk, and some other things I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#313

Post by drchiu » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

throwaway204401 wrote: post #306

drchiu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very interesting. Not to give away your company’s magic sauce of course, but if you were starting today, what niche would you target based on what you know?

In one in which you can truly empathise with your users, preferably something yourself have experienced as very inefficient and unnecessarily painful and complicated in your professional life. It can be a relatively small gap in theory covered by several larger tools but only superficially covered either because they do not truly understand the pain point of that gap or because they simply want to limit complexity of…

Thanks for the detailed thoughts! Appreciate it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#314

Post by ronyfadel » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

DougN7 wrote: post #232

ronyfadel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35$ for 1 license? Sheesh, maybe I should raise my prices!

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.

Will do!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#315

Post by ronyfadel » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

ayewo wrote: post #282

ronyfadel wrote: post #210

I'm currently making between $3k and $4k per month making little utilities for the Mac, e.g.: - Mission Control Plus to enhance macOS' Mission Control: https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus - Batteries to see your devices' batteries from your Mac: https://fadel.io/batteries

Your Batteries app looks really cool. It’s one of those apps you didn’t know you need until it is shown to you.

Thank you! It’s really one of those things macOS should’ve shipped with.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#316

Post by DizzyDoo » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

exodust wrote: post #259

DizzyDoo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly Unity and C#, I still use Python for bits and pieces (see my other comment). I made and make all the art myself, just painting in Photoshop, animating in the wonderful Spine by Esoteric Software (great tool that's worth every penny), and do all my video and audio editing in DaVinci Resolve (I used to use Adobe AfterEffects but the monthly fee was just too high for me). I also use Blender for any 3D work (I use…

> I used to use Modo, but again, the monthly fee was too high With Modo they do offer a perpetual license option where you can keep using the last version you paid for. Thanks for your insights into your process. I agree, DaVinci Resolve is an excellent replacement for Adobe. I got the Speed Controller deal last year, it's nice having the jog/shuttle wheel and buttons. Deciding what price to set games must be difficu…

Hmm, I would never price a game at $5, that sounds insanely low. I've sold a decent % of my copies in Oceania so I'm confident my pricing isn't off, it's been working for the last six/seven years in any case. From the looks of it the Australian Dollar price is just one or two US dollars more than the US price. There's always a bit of fluctuation over time though.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#317

Post by huhtenberg » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

ezekg wrote: post #103

eps wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: payments - it depends on the country, but generally Stripe + PayPal + bank wires for larger/enterprise purchases. Alternatively, Braintree. An altogether different option is to pay 2x the commission and use "full-service" reseller frontends like Digital River, PayProGlobal, etc. These are referred to as "registrators" and they used to be useful, because getting a merchant account and processing cards was a royal…

> There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend). I wouldn't say all of them suck. But that's because I built one [0] for the sole reason that, back in 2016, I too thought all of o…

> https://keygen.sh/build-vs-buy/

This is inaccurate and misleading.

The calculator assumes that there's no cost to integrating with your system. It also assumes that the developer is salaried, which is almost never the case when it's a single-person shop.

The amount of effort required to learn your system, to do the integration, to test and to support it is absolutely on par with the time it would take to make a simple licensing framework from scratch. Except that the latter doesn't create an external dependency for a critical part of customers' experience.

This is all from a perspective of desktop software vendor. Perhaps things are different when your service is used for WP plug-ins or web apps, but for desktop apps - IMNSHO - the value of it is fairly low.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#318

Post by huhtenberg » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

ziml77 wrote: post #312

tkgally wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of shareware or shareware-like desktop Mac apps that I have been relying on for many years. The programs continue to be updated regularly and don’t seem to be hobby projects, so I assume the developers are supporting themselves. Some are sold through Apple’s App Store, and some are sold directly by the developer. Here are the ones that I use most and the companies that develop them: Fission; Audio Hij…

MacOS seems to be a good place to be if you're making paid desktop software. There's a lot of Windows utilities that are freeware and of course Linux is loaded with FOSS. I only run macOS on my laptop and yet it's where I've spent the most money on various utilities. MacOS-only software I've paid for: Bartender, BetterTouchTool, Forklift, SoundSource, Pixelmator Pro, iStat Menus, Nova, Alfred, DaisyDisk, and some oth…

The state of affairs is that Mac users are more willing to pay for software than Windows users, but not by a factor of 10, which is the Windows/Mac desktop market share ratio.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#319

Post by newaccount74 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

andris9 wrote: post #281

hermitcrab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, downloading software to your desktop is a risk (cf the Solar Winds supply chain attack). I recently got asked to fill in 30 question risk assessment questionaire before someone could upgrade to the latest version of my software (I declined).

In these cases you could also ask for a 50x price as the “enterprise option”. Filling a compliance form is not just a nuisance, you could take in some liability, so decline it or make sure it’s compensated accordingly.

I've tried that. Introduced an "enterprise license" that costs a lot more and told people they needed to get the enterprise license if they want me to fill their stupid questionaire.

Not a single company took me up on my offer. After hearing I would charge extra for the questionaire, they always just bought the standard license and filling the questionaire suddenly wasn't required any more.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#320

Post by charlesg63 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

splittingTimes wrote: post #292

COGlory wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father is a dental technician and has a Dental Wings scanner. What a small world.

How cool. He should try the new "Easy" CAD software we shipped with our latest major release in December. It is a breath of fresh air and much more streamlined & intuitive workflows compared to our classic CAD Software he is used to. Reading your comment made me really happy. As a dev I am always excited to have contact with our customers. Other hate it, but I love giving 3rd level support.

Hello. So I'm the dad with the Dental Wings scanner, which I purchased from Straumann about 7 years ago. I'm using their version of the Dental Wings software. Would this be the same as the software that you're referring to, or is the Straumann version different? I am a dental technician, and I work with general dentists, so I don't take advantage of a lot of the software that's available to me. I do crowns, bridges, and implants mainly. Most of the general dentists do take impressions, and send those along, which I pour in gypsum, and scan in the scanner. I do have one dentist that I do work for that uses an intraoral scanner. For those cases I import the STL's from the Trios portal. This is cool to be chatting with a dev. What else can you tell me about it?