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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?

#151

Post by herbst »

araes wrote: post #126
trimethylpurine wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp works great. The worst thing about it is the lack of high end YouTube video tutorials. That's what you're really paying for with Adobe, I think.

Having used Gimp and Photoshop fairly extensively, I'd agree that Gimp works, and it has the features that Photoshop has (for the most part). However, there's quite a bit of user interface issues with Gimp that make somewhat simplistic activities rather irritating. Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on…

Every time I've used Photoshop the whole UI/UX changed. Buttons are moving around, getting renamed. Some functions are hidden in submenus of submenus, etc.

IMO Photoshop is just simpler because people are usually used to it. In reality Gimp always had a much more reliable UI

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

#152

Post by whatevaa »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30
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 de…

Companies prefer SAAS, as IT costs to manage that software is non-trivial. Individuals prefer standalone software, as managing costs for that software are non- existant. But company market pays much better. So we get this weird situation of SAAS for individual licenses.

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

#153

Post by outcoldman »

iKlsR wrote: post #125
outcoldman wrote: post #100

I do. macOS applications. Generating between 1,000-2,000 USD monthly (so variable because no subscriptions). Obviously this is still a hobby that I am trying to make more sustainable. But this is where I am right now after 3-4 years in this business. https://loshadki.app - you can check the apps here.

OpenIn seems like something I've been hunting for for a while on Windows, use case is I primarily use firefox but I have so many google logins that it only makes sense to use chrome where applicable for several reasons the most annoying being it's hard to toggle between accounts when logged into multiple google accounts, I also use Notion Calendar which by default tries to open firefox when you start a meeting. So my…

To be honest I am surprised how bad any OS supports browser profiles. Most people do use the same laptop for Work and Personal. And ok, now all the major browsers support profiles, but why the Password managers don't integrate with it, and support profile specific passwords for example?

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

#154

Post by Insanity »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146
quantumwoke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually an old Java stack using SWT.

It mostly doesn't matter, I can only recall one customer ever asking me about the underlying technology.

Agreed, customers don’t really care. I was just curious.

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

#155

Post by tmaly »

bsnnkv wrote: post #36
worthless-trash wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you started this, did you target a specific area that needed your skillsets or knowledge or did you research and find an area that needed better software ?

I needed the software for myself so I ended up developing it. Turns out a lot of other people wanted it too :) I have been very clear with the community from the beginning that this is software that I develop first and foremost for myself - new features and bug fixes get prioritized largely according to this. Additionally, support is not offered as part of the commercial use license and is largely community-driven. N…

what language and stack did you develop the software in?

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

#156

Post by foxglacier »

Yes. It's a Windows application for engineers. Price is a few hundred dollars per seat. The support load is pretty stable. People often have a few issues at first or when trying to do something novel, then they're fine. They have to update it themselves and occasionally I'll hear from a customer still using a 10 year old version but usually when they ask for help, they're already on the latest version, somehow. Nobody has complained that it doesn't auto-update or nag them. I make about the same money as a regular job.

All my customers are extremely pleasant to deal with. You hear horror stories about angry or entitled customers but mine are always polite and respectful. When something doesn't work right, they often act like it's their own fault. Even when they want a refund because they don't like it, they ask nicely. I suppose they know I'm a one-man-band so their expectations are a bit lower than for a giant company. But also, engineers don't seem to be dickheads generally, at least not when they're at work.

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

#157

Post by SideQuark »

herbst wrote: post #150
SideQuark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop isn’t on top simply because people know how to use it. There’s simply no better tool for most users who need that level of photo editing tool. I’ve never seen a superior product to either Photoshop or Excel. Have you? Maybe they’re on top because they really are good products.

Googles spreadsheet is much more performant, useable and shareable for me. I also never got warm with excel weird and heavily limited language, no matter how much I tried to. For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.

Sheets lags at 1000 rows. Excel allows 1 million. Excel has incredible optimization capabilities, it's numerics are vastly faster (and more accurate, thanks to Javascript being terrible for accurate math). While Javascript (sheets) is decently performant, it's no match for C++ and hand tuned assembly making Excel work. I tried but cannot find a single performance benchmark where Sheets outperforms Excel.

And the first time you need sheets to interact with any of the zillion excel spreadsheets running on the planet (all of finance and pretty much all of corporate America) and it fails and it costs you a contract, you'll switch immediately.

I'm guessing you really don't push either much at all.

Despite Sheets having a free version for almost 20 years, Excel sales are at all time highs. Go figure.

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

#158

Post by techedlaksh »

I used to do this with small windows applications earning some couple of hundreds but it always stayed as a hobby because of how it was such an unpredictable variable in my life.

I have now shifted my attention to my new product, finding a balance between one time payment and recurring payment by providing option to buy an item with “unlimited edits and yours forever” with a one time payment while still having other items to upsell to the same customer.

The release went all right, and as expected. Hopefully if the numbers are good, I might share some insights otherwise keep on.

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

#159

Post by bruce511 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #84
hulitu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need updates these days or stuff stops working fast. Maybe some engineering course will help. If you make a product that breaks in 6 months, i won't buy it from you. This really means that the amount of testing is minimal and, instead of fixing bugs, you just rewrite the "app" keeping the bugs.

You misunderstand, it is not the application code that changes, it is the code of the environment that the app lives in that changes, macOS is one of the most famous examples of breaking APIs.

The OS is part of it (Apple bad, Microsoft good) but the bigger part is integrations.

Web APIs, import and export file formats, external resources (maps etc) are all part of the equation.

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

#160

Post by herbst »

SideQuark wrote: post #157
herbst wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googles spreadsheet is much more performant, useable and shareable for me. I also never got warm with excel weird and heavily limited language, no matter how much I tried to. For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.

Sheets lags at 1000 rows. Excel allows 1 million. Excel has incredible optimization capabilities, it's numerics are vastly faster (and more accurate, thanks to Javascript being terrible for accurate math). While Javascript (sheets) is decently performant, it's no match for C++ and hand tuned assembly making Excel work. I tried but cannot find a single performance benchmark where Sheets outperforms Excel. And the firs…

Sure I am not a power user. I doubt most people are :) I never found a CSV and instantly thought "oh wow let's put that in excel" I usually would just write a random script to get the data I want the way I want it.

Edit:// I am not sure if increased sales means anything when they switched their license model so often and aggressive

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