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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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

#61

Post by fxtentacle »

Yes and no. I'm an employee so it doesn't really matter, but my side-project desktop apps pay well enough that I could live off them if I go for a student lifestyle (no pricey events, no restaurants, cooking yourself, cleaning yourself).

It was a long way. I started in the Pro Audio niche and initially supported Windows, Linux, Mac. Over time, I learned the hard way that supporting Apple's constantly changing OS is very expensive, plus Mac users tend to act the most entitled when stuff doesn't look or feel like their native OS. And Linux just never sold a license, instead I got lots of Open Source bitching. So eventually, I dropped Linux and Mac support, doubled down on the new Windows APIs and then things got nicely profitable. Price is one-off $299 for the regular app kit with perpetual updates (so far). People use the apps for making movie sound effects.

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

#62

Post by bener »

iffycan wrote: post #17

I work on a desktop budgeting application. I love that it's desktop-only (and so do the users)! It doesn't earn a living (yet), but it makes more than enough to cover expenses. [0] https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

I'm downloading now, this looks really nice.

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

#63

Post by zwieback »

Inside R&D organizations there are plenty of groups building desktop apps for internal use. We have a ton of Forms, WPF and some Qt apps we use for R&D and manufacturing purposes. Also lots of services and other non-GUI stuff.

For side-business it'll be a lot tougher than it was when I started 30 years ago.

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

#64

Post by eatonphil »

webmaven wrote: post #60
eatonphil wrote: post #4

I'm building a desktop-first (SaaS-eventual) data IDE for developers [0]. Making a living? Not yet. It being desktop-first makes it as easy to try out in a corporate environment as Sublime. The data never leaves your machine. Desktop-first is a big deal in devtools for this reason. [0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

This reminds me of OpenRefine: https://openrefine.org/

Neat project and wow acquired by Google! Good for them.

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

#65

Post by loxias »

outcoldman wrote: post #52

Have 4 macos apps that I have built about an year ago. Getting 600-1500 a month. https://loshadki.app/

Curious to know how you approached advertising/marketing. How did people find your apps? How much effort and money was spent on finding customers?

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

#66

Post by ncpa-cpl »

Osiris wrote: post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

Hi :) I've been a long time user of Battery Bar Pro. Thank you! Its one of the first apps that I install on my new computers. What would be the best way to do a feature request/bug report?

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

#68

Post by semireg »

This is my 3rd (or is it 4th?) year of developing and selling Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels. Originally it only worked with USB thermal printers, but over the last few years it's grown into a multi-function image-rendering pipeline that integrates data import (via spreadsheet, CSV or API) with barcodes, text, image output. My app revenue eclipsed my iOS/NodeJS consulting in 2021 and I hope to double revenue in 2022. Read more at https://label.live/features.

The tech stack for this app is really interesting (to me at least, natch). Lots of native node modules that need finesse on both macOS and Windows. I don't yet support Linux because out of thousands of users, only 2 people have emailed about Linux support (probably both from HN!).

I really love building Electron apps. It's a total joy bringing something (albeit "inefficiently" wrt memory and "native" qualities) like this to market for a niche that's otherwise a dumpster fire of old and clunky 1980s-era Windows-only software.

As for licensing, Label LIVE is licensed per computer. I wrote a custom license implementation leveraging JWT. The JWT is signed by my license server and the app verifies the signature and that the contents match the "fingerprint" of the computer being licensed, expiration, etc.

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

#69

Post by eps »

QuiiBz wrote: post #49
jventura wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it syncs the data between instances of the app (on the cloud - 10GB or something like that..).

By default, it's synced on Inkdrop's servers, but you can self-host your own DB if you want. It's well described in the docs: https://docs.inkdrop.app/manual/synchronizing-in-the-cloud

... in which case paying per month makes no sense.

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

#70

Post by throwaway204401 »

We sell a desktop app with an involvement in dev and support of about 0.25-0.50 FTE, with revenues in the range of $50K/month although it was launched 9 years ago and the first year was only about $2K/month. The server side is just one Windows 4GB server for user signups, billing and license validation. One good thing of desktop apps is that the server side is so cheap, you are basically selling IP.

It has this features:

* B2B in a niche market (TAM * Some viral component so you do not have to spend money on ads for growth.

* Sold as a subscription and only as a subscription. Don't innovate with licensing focus on product, this is important. When users have fewer buying options, they decide faster. That's why Steve Jobs reduced 50 Mac models to just 3.

* When the subscription ends, the application must stop working. This is also very important. You want your entire user base to be able to install the last version. You do not want to support older versions, you only want to support one.

* Has to have a very generous trial so that users have time to find use cases with your product. Better a trial based in actual usage instead of exploding trial base in calendar days. You want your users to actually use your product and depend on it.

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