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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?

#111

Post by GoblinSlayer »

SideQuark wrote: post #89
thayne wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Adobe photoshop is what people are tought how to use. It is the same thing with excel. It isn't enough to have a superior product, you also have to overcome the momentum of the prevailing software. That's not to say it is impossible, but Photoshop has a significant advantage.

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.

I know mspaint better, it starts faster too.

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

#112

Post by gregmac »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #19

I believe they are called "apps" now, it's a $500B market. As far as desktop software, it's the same as it ever was... you make a product, you release it for download, you sell a license. No mystery to it. But it often makes more sense to sell it as a subscription; you can make it very cheap for the user up front, and get a continuous revenue stream. Subscriptions make more sense if you provide constant updates, supp…

Yeah, at the core of it I see this as a value problem.

If you charge a lot, it's a tough or impossible sell for users who aren't yet sure they'll get that amount of value from it. If you charge too little, you're leaving money on the table from big customers who would be willing to pay much more.

Setting the up-front cost also requires you to estimate a bunch of things: what will it cost you to build (including future time to get to "feature complete" for this version), how many do you think you are going to sell, how much time is each customer going to take up? In other words: this is what you value your time at, but you can't know most of the numbers used ahead of time. You need this for subscriptions, too, but there's a bit more latitude to change, and you don't necessarily have any obligations should you decide to just stop at the end of the next billing cycle.

Longer term, there's also an incentive problem for you as the vendor. If you're very successful and saturate your market, why build new versions? Your incentive switches to making a "major" version with huge upgrades, which has a whole ton of downsides (which smart customers see, or learn the hard way). It's riskier than frequent, small releases: your first major real testing and feedback comes after a ton of massive changes. It incentives change for the sake of change (so you can justify a "major" version) as opposed to real improvements. Even fixing bugs becomes purely a cost, the only real incentives are pride/reputation, and hoping they'll buy the next major version.

Subscriptions help even this out, and tying the cost to some usage metric can make the cost reflect the value even more, even as the usage changes over time (eg: the customer grows).

The worst thing with subscriptions is when the cost doesn't reflect the value. If as a user, you pay $20/mo for something that enables you to make $2000/month, that's a no-brainer. When you have to pay $20/month for something that is useful 4 or 5 times a year, or when it's really hard to figure out what, if any, value you're getting for your money, that's when it becomes a problem.

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

#113

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mojomark wrote: post #107
vunderba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that's why every company is moving towards SaaS... This is a bold and not necessarily true statement. It really comes down to your target market. A SaaS is a much less disputed cost when it's targeting businesses but you're much more likely to encounter resistance to a subscription when you're targeting individual consumers. There is plenty of highly successful mainstream modern day software that offers a perpe…

100% this. This helps consumers understand the need for SW maintenance services on their own, without having to convince them... "You want to keep the software alive on your WindowsXP machine after the 2yr support garuntee that comes with your perpetual license is up? Have at it. However, here's a nice service package that will get you back up and running when your ready to upgrade your environment to align with the…

What do you do that windows xp is not enough for you? It has network, file system, gui, and these things didn't change much lately, only hardware support changed, really. Same goes for something like CentOS 6.

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

#114

Post by Delphiza »

stakhanov wrote: post #72

Legal changes are making it increasingly very difficult to sell perpetual licenses. For example, in Germany, a new law recently took effect that clarifies that if you sell a software license for a given period of time, you're liable to provide whatever updates/support the customer may need over the course of the software's licensing period to enable the customer to keep running it, at no additional cost, regardless o…

That is a good point that US-based developers may not be aware of. The EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) mandates "an obligation to provide duty of care for the entire lifecycle of such products", mostly by requiring updates for security vulnerabilities. Any software that connects to the network (or Internet) has to be assumed to have a vector for vulnerability at some point in the future. This means that it has to be updatable, and cannot be a perpetual license.

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

#115

Post by trimethylpurine »

satvikpendem wrote: post #75
trimethylpurine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

likely due to subscription fatigue It's due to a-hole fatigue. These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much. There are just too many vendors in the middle to get any expectation of a good experience. And to top it off, every time I buy SaaS the vendor is bought by some private equity giant before the first payment and the product turns to shit…

> These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much I mean, you try making such software and let me know how that goes for you. This type of vague criticism sounds a lot like the typical engineer retort of "I can build it myself in a weekend," discounting the real complexity involved.

I'll try to be more specific. Stuffing a win32 app into a Citrix box and selling it to the next private equity that will offshore your support while your customer's contract milks them for another 3 years doesn't make for an enticing offer for decision makers. It makes a lot of sense for the private equity purchaser who will sell the company again before those contracts run dry and the software is shuttered or replaced.

As the decision maker (also a software engineer) I will work hard to avoid SaaS because it's a sensible move. And that is especially true if other engineers believe as you do that it's difficult to make a good product.

By comparison, the same app, installed locally, doesn't suffer from any of the above problems. There is no contract, no latency, and I don't have any risk if the company is sold. I will likely just have to find another solution provider, in the last case, but at least I'm not locked into additional years of servitude supporting a poor product for my users.

In summary, SaaS itself might be great. But the subscriptions that it usually comes with tend to incentivize bad vendor behavior and a poor customer experience.

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

#116

Post by anonzzzies »

mojomark wrote: post #109
theshrike79 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually if something is written into law, a person can't waive those rights with a separate contract.

Yeah, (and I realize this is all based on a half-remebered law) but the OP said the law only obligated the company to support the SW fully "during the licensing period". In my experience, most perpetual licenses come with some initial "support agreement" (2yr, 4yr, etc.). After that, the user can still use the SW, and the company wouldn't be obligated to provide support. So, this law sounds like it's really preventin…

From the a-hole part, I can infer you think forcing subscriptions for everything is somehow protecting the consumer? I want to give you software I am going to support for the coming 5 year or what not for a one off price and after that you can still run it forever but no more support. Is that not a far better deal? But maybe I miss understand you.

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

#117

Post by satvikpendem »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #115
satvikpendem wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much I mean, you try making such software and let me know how that goes for you. This type of vague criticism sounds a lot like the typical engineer retort of "I can build it myself in a weekend," discounting the real complexity involved.

I'll try to be more specific. Stuffing a win32 app into a Citrix box and selling it to the next private equity that will offshore your support while your customer's contract milks them for another 3 years doesn't make for an enticing offer for decision makers. It makes a lot of sense for the private equity purchaser who will sell the company again before those contracts run dry and the software is shuttered or replac…

Why would there be no contract with a local app? At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be. These aren't going to be standalone 100 dollar apps for that level of scale.

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

#118

Post by trimethylpurine »

satvikpendem wrote: post #117
trimethylpurine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try to be more specific. Stuffing a win32 app into a Citrix box and selling it to the next private equity that will offshore your support while your customer's contract milks them for another 3 years doesn't make for an enticing offer for decision makers. It makes a lot of sense for the private equity purchaser who will sell the company again before those contracts run dry and the software is shuttered or replac…

Why would there be no contract with a local app? At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be. These aren't going to be standalone 100 dollar apps for that level of scale.

>At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be.

Many very large enterprise software providers (Sage, Oracle, IBM) and small OSS shops (Grafana, Zabbix, ProxMox) offer run local versions of ERPs or entire applications with no usage restrictions. The licensing pays for support and updates, not usage. In this model, the software provider has incentive to provide good support, and quality updates. They care to maintain the product because their care is what they are selling.

So, it won't absolutely be the case at this scale. Business as usual is the opposite of that at this scale. I should have to prove beyond doubt that there is no alternative when I agree to sign for SaaS. I'm agreeing to take on a lot of risk when I do that.

>Why would there be no contract with a local app?

Because that's what I want to buy, and for good reason (see above). And someone has figured that out and sold it to me.

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

#119

Post by anonzzzies »

mojomark wrote: post #109
theshrike79 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually if something is written into law, a person can't waive those rights with a separate contract.

Yeah, (and I realize this is all based on a half-remebered law) but the OP said the law only obligated the company to support the SW fully "during the licensing period". In my experience, most perpetual licenses come with some initial "support agreement" (2yr, 4yr, etc.). After that, the user can still use the SW, and the company wouldn't be obligated to provide support. So, this law sounds like it's really preventin…

By the way; the perpetual 'for life' stuff gets sold on SaaS sales sites like appsumo all the time. It’s just a grift and should be forbidden: hopefully some law will be made for that as well.

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

#120

Post by vunderba »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #60
irrational wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop 6 does everything I ever want Photoshop to do. I wish Adobe would continue to sell a one time purchase copy of PS6 instead of forcing everyone to SaaS. Fortunately I own a physical copy of the PS6 disks that I purchased years ago, so I don’t have a problem acquiring PS6 on any new machines by various means.

A little off topic, but, if you'll indulge me: Why do you think nobody has been able to make a successful alternative to Photoshop? Everybody I know complains about it constantly, and yet it's still the industry standard.

There are plenty of successful alternatives to Photoshop (Affinity, Pixelmator, Krita, etc). The issue as always is vendor lock-in - when everyone you're doing business with is expecting to be able to collaborate using Adobe then it becomes a huge pain point.
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