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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?

#171

Post by rozab »

grujicd wrote: post #116

I'm making Windows/.Net based app for managing queues - QueueExplorer. Started with MSMQ support back in 2005, now it supports Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ. It's old fashioned perpetual licensing, so revenue is a rollercoaster. Because of that, it's emotional rollercoaster as well. Good thing is you get paid for full license at the time of purchase instead of collecting it in 10-20 months. Bad thing is ev…

Have you looked into .NET MAUI yet? I'm cautiously optimistic, but haven't dug into it. Should be releasing Q2 this year.

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

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

#172

Post by RantyDave »

mapmap wrote: post #32
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…

What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment / piracy protection?

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but the Mac AppStore is the only thing at ever truly worked for me.

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

#173

Post by DizzyDoo »

optymizer wrote: post #139
DizzyDoo wrote: post #91

I make video games like this one [0] or this one [1]. It's pretty simple, you can buy the game and then download and play it. Are games 'desktop apps'? It's not the language I would normally use but I think it applies. Having been out of the web app development bubble for about seven years now, there's whole industries that work entirely in the pay-for-it-and-then-download model, and while games-as-a-service is more…

Congrats on releasing games on Steam! I'd like at some point quit my job and run a small game studio. I have so many questions, mostly out of curiosity. If you could answer the ones you're comfortable with, I'd appreciate it: * What's your tech stack for the games? Are you using an engine? * Who made the art? If you did it yourself, what software are you using? * How was the process for releasing your game on Steam?…

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 used to use Modo, but again, the monthly fee was too high).

Marketing for The Cat Machine wasn't too bad, I had an okay ground game with getting coverage from gaming websites and someone posts it on Reddit and for 2015 that was good-enough marketing for the time, more than enough to Greenlight the game. The voice actor is Scott Gilmour (@scottgilmour7 on Twitter) and I found him after listening to about 100 voice samples on all the different VO websites. He's fantastic! I don't share my sales numbers publicly, but Steam is about 70% of The Cat Machine sales, and about 25% is from the Apple Mac Store - where the game actually hasn't been published for about a year now, I need to get on that and reupload it. And games is right now my full time job, so no IP clauses needed negotiating, and my old employer back in 2015 was very chill about letting me work on my own stuff.

Hope that helps!

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

#174

Post by fsloth »

ramoz wrote: post #144
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download Visual Studio Community Edition and go to New Project -> WPF project and start learning C#. That's probably the path forward with the best chance of overall success.

This as opposed to cross-platform? Any general use case or for a targets Windows user base?

Afaik .net is cross-platform nowadays - Windows dev tools are likely to be most approachable though.

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

#175

Post by hermitcrab »

czeh wrote: post #121

I spent a few years on a side project for a 'better' screenshot tool: https://www.bettersnipper.com/ Tried to sell it for $5 home / $14 office, but only got a handful of purchases. I still personally use it every day and have probably collect 10k+ Snips across all my computers. I converted the entire program from VB.NET -> C#.NET over a year which burned me out and I've kind of just let it wither due to lack of inter…

I find it hard to take seriously software that is $5. Google 'price as signal'. Also you are up against some very established and polished competitors, such as SnagIT.

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

#176

Post by ChadB »

semireg wrote: post #68

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…

This is really cool! I'm working on an asset tracking application right now (https://www.assetbots.com/), and generating labels are a big part of the workflow. My roadmap calls for simply generating Avery sheets.

But it would be AWESOME if I could let a user click a button and send them to a labellive:// URL and have it just work. I'll explore a little and see if there's a mom-tested way to make this usable.

Again, very cool app!

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

#177

Post by nightski »

scarface74 wrote: post #135
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

Why would I want to sit at my computer to manage my budget instead of being able to access it anywhere? I always have a “computer in my pocket”.

I do this every day with YNAB (even though they have a mobile app). Takes about 5 minutes. So much easier on a computer than on a tiny phone.

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

#179

Post by drchiu »

throwaway204401 wrote: post #70

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 featu…

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?

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

#180

Post by hermitcrab »

Melatonic wrote: post #170
hermitcrab wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a product that costs $5? Forget it. No-way you will get a return. (Background: making a living selling software online for 16 years, advertised continuously on Adwords for nearly all of that).

If you optimize so that you are paying maybe 2-5 cents a click it really just depends on the application and industry. Something people need to buy right then and there is going to have much better conversion than something they need to research and think about it. Plus there is value in just getting the name of your software out there and into peoples hands so that it then spreads organically after that. For somethi…

If you are paying 5 cents a click, then you might just about break even ( typically click to buy conversion rates are around 1% for desktop software: https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/04/23/the-truth-about-co... ).

But it is almost impossible to get any worthwhile traffic from Adwords in 2022 (in terms of volume or quality) at 5 cents a click.

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