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Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#51

Post by alexgmcm »

vbezhenar wrote: post #45
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #18

I've built a small tool that I distributed as "free for personal use, contact me for a commercial license", without technical enforcement, not even a nag screen. I made one (1) sale, despite receiving e-mails from several people thanking me that they're happily using it at work, and that sale was to a company who wanted customization, and only ended up actually paying the invoice when they asked for another round of…

Is using a crack easier than dealing with bureaucracy?

Using a crack has both legal and security implications for the company and therefore at least in my place of work can result in serious consequences for the employee including termination of employment.

So I'd imagine most people wouldn't risk it.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#52

Post by vbezhenar »

alexgmcm wrote: post #51
vbezhenar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is using a crack easier than dealing with bureaucracy?

Using a crack has both legal and security implications for the company and therefore at least in my place of work can result in serious consequences for the employee including termination of employment. So I'd imagine most people wouldn't risk it.

Most of nag screens implying that you should buy or uninstall software in 30 days or something like that. It's written in license. They just don't enforce it. So violating license is acceptable while cracking is not?

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#53

Post by dchest »

bluedino wrote: post #5
taprun wrote: post #3

Donation ware is a thing, but it rarely works well. Besides, hockey stick growth on a product that is free to obtain and use isn't a surefire means of proving future profitability. The easiest way to make money is the old fashioned way: charge for it.

Or charge for support

Any examples of successful companies that charge for support for their own free product?

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#54

Post by NullPrefix »

vbezhenar wrote: post #52
alexgmcm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a crack has both legal and security implications for the company and therefore at least in my place of work can result in serious consequences for the employee including termination of employment. So I'd imagine most people wouldn't risk it.

Most of nag screens implying that you should buy or uninstall software in 30 days or something like that. It's written in license. They just don't enforce it. So violating license is acceptable while cracking is not?

IIRC win10 allows installing without entering product key and keeps somewhat working after the 30day period that it gives to enter that key.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#55

Post by eps »

Go with a trial model with online license activation. This works really well.

More specifically - allow to use the program without a license for X days and the cripple it in some annoying way until the installation is licensed. Activation should pass some machine details to the licensing server, which will then pass back them hashed and signed. The program should have the public part of the licensing key embedded, so on launch it would read the license, verify the sig and check that the license still matches the machine.

Also, for this to work well you will want to have some basic protection against reversing in place. It should not be possible to NOP the IF in the license check, replace the signing pub key or to side-load DLLs. This is a large subject of its own, but there are off-the-shelf solutions for this (called exe protectors)... though the con here is the perpetual hassle with false positive detection from anti-viruses and such.

PS.

I should add that "pay what you want" model doesn't work at all. It absolutely doesn't work for enterprise software and it doesn't even work with home users. It basically makes the software look not valued enough even by its own creator.

Ditto for the donation model unless the active audience size is in 100s of thousands. Donation model is not really a model to begin with, it lacks predictability.

Differntiating pricing tiers just by the user type - personal/home vs. business/commercial - works very poorly as well. People cheat. The only thing that really works as a price differentiator are the features. Pay more - get more. Also, charging for Windows Server installs 10x the normal price is a perfectly acceptable practice that works well.

If you have any questions - ask, I'd be happy to answer what I can.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#56

Post by jakobegger »

If you want to make any meaningful money, you need to give people a good reason to pay. Asking for donations is not going to result in a lot of money. I've never heard from anyone making more than 500$ a year from donations for an app.

So you will need to add some kind of restriction to make people pay for your app.

The restriction depends on the usage type of your app.

- If it is something that lots of people use everyday (like a text editor), you might get away with a nag dialog. Annoy a large number of people just a bit every day, and some of them will buy a license.

- If it is something that people use just once (eg. a file conversion app) you absolutely have to require payment before people can do what they want, or they will never come back.

- If is something that companies will want to customise, and you want to distribute source code, you probably need to charge a lot of money for it. Only few companies can afford to hire someone to write custom software, so you need to make sure you charge them enough that it is sustainable.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#57

Post by dotdi »

mherrmann wrote: post #31

I've been developing a cross-platform file manager [1] for the past 2.5 years. It is shareware with a nag screen. It currently makes ~$500 per month. Generally, I would say yes, shareware still works. But it is hard a) to write desktop software [2] and b) to convince people to pay for it. I would not give people the sources. It would make them feel even more like "I don't need to pay for this". What works for me is t…

The layout of your top-bar somewhat breaks[0] if I zoom in beyond 130%

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[0]: https://imgur.com/a/f9CATyj

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#58

Post by clort »

8bitsrule wrote: post #33

If it's possible for your application, you might consider offering a 'feature-limited' aka 'crippleware' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware ) product to help you determine its potential usefullness to a wider audience. There are a number of approaches to doing that. After getting burned a few times paying $(100s) full-price for products just to find out that a feature I expected/needed was missing, I stopped…

I use QCAD occasionally which falls into this category

  https://www.qcad.org/
The author provides downloadable versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the source is available on Github if you want to build it yourself or provide bugfixes or extra features. He provides some features as extensions in a trial mode which ends after 15mins or so or you can disable them. Its pretty neat and to be honest the price for the full version does not seem to be that much though the community edition has always been sufficient for my needs and has enabled me to contribute with bugs/fixes/features.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#59

Post by nl »

eigenvector wrote: post #47
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #18

I've built a small tool that I distributed as "free for personal use, contact me for a commercial license", without technical enforcement, not even a nag screen. I made one (1) sale, despite receiving e-mails from several people thanking me that they're happily using it at work, and that sale was to a company who wanted customization, and only ended up actually paying the invoice when they asked for another round of…

Companies have successfully convinced themselves that anything software is some form of black magic that can only be procured by the IT department and through a small army of Business Development Managers. In my job I have fairly broad discretion to purchase things, generally up to $100,000 I need only write a one-paragraph justification of what I'm doing as long as I'm working within an approved budget. Except 'IT'.…

This is where shadow IT comes from and why Lots of managers have credit cards and will pay the SaaS fee and ignore procurement processes. The the app becomes embedded in the company and the procurement team has to accept the reality of it.

Re: Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

#60

Post by rusk »

eigenvector wrote: post #47
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #18

I've built a small tool that I distributed as "free for personal use, contact me for a commercial license", without technical enforcement, not even a nag screen. I made one (1) sale, despite receiving e-mails from several people thanking me that they're happily using it at work, and that sale was to a company who wanted customization, and only ended up actually paying the invoice when they asked for another round of…

Companies have successfully convinced themselves that anything software is some form of black magic that can only be procured by the IT department and through a small army of Business Development Managers. In my job I have fairly broad discretion to purchase things, generally up to $100,000 I need only write a one-paragraph justification of what I'm doing as long as I'm working within an approved budget. Except 'IT'.…

.. and knowing at the end of it that we paid 3x the market price to get it from our 'Preferred Supplier’

Very clear what’s going on there once you get to the end. Somebody’s got themselves a nice cash cow sewn up.

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