Curious if any HNers are running successful businesses selling desktop/downloadable software with a one-time payment model - not SaaS, not subscriptions. Something like the old days. How's the market for that? What's your experience with support and updates?
Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#2[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#3Yes, I have a side project making ~$40k/year doing this in a niche market.
I am fortunate in that I have some volunteers helping me with support so all up I spend about 5-10 hours per week doing support and development work.
In terms of business model, I have been quite generous and provide a perpetual support model for free and paid customers and do not charge for upgrades (currently). As my time has become more limited, I am looking at changing this.
Benefits of this model is that my product is the gold standard in the area and relatively sticky.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#4Yes, I have a side project making ~$40k/year doing this in a niche market. I am fortunate in that I have some volunteers helping me with support so all up I spend about 5-10 hours per week doing support and development work. In terms of business model, I have been quite generous and provide a perpetual support model for free and paid customers and do not charge for upgrades (currently). As my time has become more lim…
Which stack did you end up using?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#5Yes, I have a side project making ~$40k/year doing this in a niche market. I am fortunate in that I have some volunteers helping me with support so all up I spend about 5-10 hours per week doing support and development work. In terms of business model, I have been quite generous and provide a perpetual support model for free and paid customers and do not charge for upgrades (currently). As my time has become more lim…
I just updated "GrandPrix Race Manager" for $25 from the vendor. It's an annual cost for my local derby thing. No idea how many copies they sell, but it's on version 24, so they must be doing OK-ish. Stand-alone Python application.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#6My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on two machines, you had to buy two licenses with two keys.
Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.
Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.
Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#7I want so much to be in the business of selling my own traditional downloadable software, that I've thought about (in the absence of an idea) just putting together a do-nothing application with payment, installer, configuration dialogs, bug feedback - everything but a raison d'etre.
The irony is in my day job I am developing a traditional downloadable Windows application which will come with an immediate user base. But although I have considerable discretion over the project, it isn't mine (in an intellectual property sense), and I'm not getting rich off it.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#8I'm not running the show, but I am working at a place that does this. One time fee for a perpetual license for the current major version, free support, and historically ~6 years of updates per version.
Users tend to be quite happy about it, and we're profitable enough to pay comfortable salaries and have...a lot...of runway.
Of course, this model is possible because there was never any outside investment.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#9My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on…
> used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port).
Nitpick: I think you mean “demurrage”: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/demurrage.asp
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?
#10My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on…
He inherited a existing customer base in a niche field. That's not exactly easy to replicate from scratch.