321–330 of 361 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, too, am a couple of pay raises away from paying someone else to clean me
TBH this is not a pay issue, no matter whether I can afford it. I would hate that a stranger enters my house to clean, and I would hate it even more when I was not at home.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer mainly on Mac, which windows APIs are you referring to that are new, and how do you normally distribute your app, is it through a Windows store or independently?
Dxva, the windows dx12 multimedia API Separate store and fastspring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
...or Sharex, that is pratically a swiss army knife
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.
Often, german elementary teachers are facing the following situation:
Consider a typical class of children with only a half of them capable to understand german. The teacher then constantly switches between those two groups trying to help each child as good as he/she can. That can be very frustrating because the teacher simply does not have the time to help each child as it needs (because the non-german speaking children often really need a 1:1 care to learn efficient). The other half, the german-speaking children, will quickly come short as well.
So we developed a learning software which is so simple that every child can start learning with it instantly.
The problem we are solving with it: The non-german children are now able to learn for themselfs without the need to ask the teacher while having great fun and much better progress than before!
Once they are at a level where they unterstand the basic german words, they can follow the lessons much better which results in much higher quality of the lessons for them and beeing able to learn even quicker each time.
As our small two person team consists of a elementary teacher who is working every day with those children (and is therefore constantly improving our products as she's using it in her own class) we know exactly what those teachers want for their children and what is giving the best results and motivation for them to learn german!
It is a great joy to help all those children - it does not make big numbers in terms of revenue but it will enough for a living shortly. That's more we ever dreamed of as we started nearly six years ago :-)
We (an elementary teacher and a computer scientist) are helping migrant children without any knowledge of the german language to learn it easily and give elementary teachers much more time and improve the quality of their lessons dramaticaly with a desktop application for learning the german language and various perfect fitting supplementary materials. Often, german elementary teachers are facing the following situat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sim…
Thanks for the feedback! And that’s correct, but I think you misunderstand the calculator. This is for the cost of the licensing server alone, not the integration into a software application, which will of course cost additional time/money either way. Regardless, the real build vs buy savings in almost any third-party are in often forgotten long-term maintenance costs.
> It also assumes that the developer is salaried, which is almost never the case when it's a single-person shop.
If you don’t have a salaried developer, or at least have an average spend per-year to be able to input (even if it’s yourself at an hourly rate), then you likely aren’t my target market. And that’s totally fine. One-person shops like to unnecessarily build things in-house because they typically value their time at near-zero. They’ll spend weeks building something they could have paid $19/mo for. (Which is fine -- they churn more often and require more support, in my experience.)
> 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.
Keyword here would be “simple.” In my experience from running the business for nearly 6 years, most licensing systems aren’t simple. And if they are, they likely don’t even need a licensing server in the first place -- just do signed license keys.
I have testimonial after testimonial of the opposite conclusion -- that the API saved significant time and money -- especially for the long tail, years after integration.
Unless your licensing system is incredibly simple (and in my experience they rarely are), there’s money to be saved in not building and maintaining it in-house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks for the tip. It’s interesting that iPhone apps can survive at $2.99 price points but not desktop software. No app ecosystem to blame? (Does anyone actually use the Windows Store?)
The Windows store is a total joke. And this must be their third or fourth attempt. It must be quite embarassing for Microsoft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.