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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?

#21

Post by fullstackchris »

lefstathiou wrote: post #6

My 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…

Nitpick here: both models are still SaaS, the only difference is the first way was deployed via (desktop?) app and the second via web.

But indeed, web is typically the most flexible option unless you are leveraging something on the OS that would otherwise be cumbersom or impossible via web (not often the case)

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#22

Post by shipscode »

The issue is that one time purchases have perpetual costs. Software has become complex enough where the subscription model is all but required in todays day and age to serve happy customers - and can even be cheaper to users rather than rolling customer LTV into a one time purchase.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#23

Post by sirjaz »

lefstathiou wrote: post #6

My 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…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#25

Post by sirjaz »

fullstackchris wrote: post #21
lefstathiou wrote: post #6

My 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…

Nitpick here: both models are still SaaS, the only difference is the first way was deployed via (desktop?) app and the second via web. But indeed, web is typically the most flexible option unless you are leveraging something on the OS that would otherwise be cumbersom or impossible via web (not often the case)

Unfortunately, a vast majority of WebApps are hot garbage and even the good ones can never be as functional or as performative as a native app. We have such powerful machines, but we relegate them to such a horrible method of using them.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#26

Post by ensemblehq »

lefstathiou wrote: post #6

My 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…

That's an awesome story. How did your brother find the opportunity to acquire the aging app?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#27

Post by iainctduncan »

Absolutely. Typically in specialized areas that need lots of local compute and low latency. I work in technical diligence, so I can't say who, but I can say that I have done diligences on companies selling desktop downloadable software and making great money, with license fees ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands per customer.

Audio software is another one.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#29

Post by kijin »

shipscode wrote: post #22

The issue is that one time purchases have perpetual costs. Software has become complex enough where the subscription model is all but required in todays day and age to serve happy customers - and can even be cheaper to users rather than rolling customer LTV into a one time purchase.

It used to work back when the software market was growing exponentially. You could take care of old customers using revenue from new customers, because you always had more new customers than old ones. Upgrade cycles also used to be much shorter, and nobody cared about security bugs. So you didn't really have to maintain old versions for long.

It was a Ponzi scheme of sorts, and it worked for a while. Obviously it can't go on forever, especially when growth slows down.

Maybe if you could convince your customers to use a subscription-based add-on service on top of the one-time purchase, you might make the business model keep working for a while longer.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

#30

Post by satvikpendem »

lefstathiou wrote: post #6

My 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…

Thanks for stating this. Some customers (who are often the vocal minority) don't like SaaS likely due to subscription fatigue but most don't realize the amount of manpower it requires to continuously update software that will atrophy without them, not to mention adding more features.

The business reality is often not understood by the users and that's why every company is moving towards SaaS, it allows the company developing the product to continue to stay in business rather than providing a product then shuttering because it couldn't sell enough.

The former is simply more sustainable than the other, much as some (like the vocal minority) might disagree with this fact.

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That being said, there are many who sell one-time licenses, especially in the indie hacker space on Twitter, such as NomadList and BoltAI. Their model works because they make enough money from their products to retire on, as solo devs, and their products aren't necessarily ones that require constant updates (well, maybe BoltAI as new AI advances come out all the time that need to be implemented, such as RAG, parsing PDFs, storing "memories" like OpenAI, etc, but most advances come through new models, which is just an API call away).

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