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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#191

Post by ativzzz »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #188
ativzzz wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A former company I worked for started having a larger Indian userbase. We experimented with supporting them more and it would be similar to what you said - significantly lower prices for them. We chose to mostly ignore the Indian userbase and let them use the product as is without catering to them The reality is that just because someone pays less doesn't mean they cost less to support. And then, if you support a lar…

you can make people pay 10 cents a month for the software but the support is a separate subscription

Support includes things like "I paid and my account doesn't work". In addition, you simply can't provide a good service without support. Being able to answer questions like "I'm trying to do X with your tool, how do I do it?" leads to better customer engagement and retention. It's part of the cost of doing business. The marginal benefit of doing that to microrevenue customers is not worth it financially, and as a result, you will never get as good of engagement nor retention from them.

One of the strengths of small business over a big co like Google is your support is NOT automated and you take the time and care to talk to and answer your customer's questions. You can't do that when you charge 10 cents a customer

On top of that, you still need to market/advertise to those users.

It's less time consuming, causes less friction, and is more profitable to just charge $10 dollars instead

Re: A world where people pay for software

#192

Post by chinchilla2020 »

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

Yes. Software is a low-capital business and many people in tech don't want to believe it.

A few offices, macbooks, and data center space is very cheap compared to building a manufacturing plant.

On the other side, what tech people understand that the general public does not... is that software has a healthy dose of maintenance and operational costs when it scales. Not a massive cost, but higher than zero - which is what most MBAs think the maintenance cost is.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#193

Post by mschuster91 »

ysavir wrote: post #159
cscheid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software has no marginal cost. Maybe you've never experienced the difference between writing software for 1000 people and writing software for 1M people, or (I imagine) 1B. The marginal per-person cost of software is not on shipping. It's on "what kind of weird shit will I now have to do because 1M is a lot of chances for my software to break weirdly, and people have paid for it" > You don't have to worry about qua…

That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle requests from all your users, and more users means more requests to handle. But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? Yes, havi…

> But do those scenarios impact the quality of the product for other users?

Absolutely. Anything involving internationalization is an open invitation for very weird edge cases. Some languages (Hebrew!) are written right-to-left, some require more than one byte to store (Japanese, Chinese), time formats and time zones vary, some write currencies with the symbol in the front (US dollar) and some at the end (Euro).

If all your testing was done by Americans speaking English, the only thing you may stumble upon is timezones. If you're in Europe, timezones won't be much of an issue (as almost everyone is on CET), but you may find out that, whoops, Windows localizes certain path elements like C:\Users.

On top of that, a constant pain point in support is displays. Most Windows users are on a 1080p screen on their laptop, but may plug in their new 4K monitor and notice that your UI is completely illegible because it doesn't respect DPI settings. Or you thought you supported variable DPI, but never planned on a user stretching your window across two screens with different DPI settings. Or monitors use different color profiles or gamma settings and users complaining about that.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#194

Post by CBarkleyU »

robalni wrote: post #172
CBarkleyU wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>doesn't make any good software What if the person does make decent software, but is a huge influencer? Why not opt for the Spotify model? Usage = money. Why turn this into a popularity contest?

> What if the person does make decent software, but is a huge influencer? Then they would probably be able to make more money selling subscriptions than other developers that are less known. I don't know how different that would be though from if they sold physical products. One important thing here is that there is a limit to how many subscriptions one developer can sell. This is done to emulate physical products as…

> I don't know how different that would be though from if they sold physical products

I mean that's the literal point of this website, no? In the real world, a sale is a sale. Imagine going into BestBuy, leaving $100 at the front, telling the clerk to put it all into Sony (because Sony is 4 cool kidz) and then just grabbing a nVidia graphics card and Apple AirPods.

> One important thing here is that there is a limit to how many subscriptions one developer can sell.

Definitely interested in seeing how this will play out. Sounds like a recipe for either (a) a super cool, tightly nit community with high quality contributers who care about their software or (b) a dump for software which woudlnt cut it in the real world market.

>Also, they would probably sell the subscriptions for a higher price than other developers, since they can, which would mean that people who don't know about that person would buy from someone who is cheaper.

My game theory senses are tingling. Why would I incentivize people into buying other people's subscription while gaining access to my stuff?

>That means there has to be usage statistics collection in all software.

You could always implement it on your end, right? Could be download based, or whatever. A one time thingy.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#195

Post by blueyes »

People pay for scarcity, not utility. In economics, this is expressed as the water-diamond paradox. Software makers simply need to find ways to make some piece of what they sell scarce (managed workloads). Everything else depends on the conspicuous consumption of idealists; ie it doesn't scale.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#196

Post by hbn »

steveBK123 wrote: post #94
jehb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been my experience at all with SaaS. I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools they replaced stop working. There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data formats to the point where eve…

SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these get shaken out over the next couple years finally. For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time, and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time. However, the old model was…

> I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars.

Because everything is a recurring automatic charge to my credit card, and one more thing to try and keep track of and continually reevaluate if it's still valuable enough to me to continue paying for it.

When you bought a CD you didn't have to from that point forward continue to think about if you want to continue paying money to have access to the CD.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#197

Post by gnulinux »

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

It's almost like we live in different world, I could not disagree more.

* Software is extremely expensive. Software engineers are expensive, and for a good software project you need a tech lead, a manager and probably a few developers. These are all people you need to pay tons of money for.

* Software is constantly changing, something that worked 2 years ago can be broken beyond repair today. You need a team that can keep up with this.

* Software needs maintenance. You can't just build an app an call it a day, you need to employ a team to maintain it continuously. You can build a massive, gargantuan bridge and maintain it maybe every few years/half a decade to keep it safe for 30+ years, you cannot do that in software.

* Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring" CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project. If you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll tell you about all the techniques that were developed over the many many decades. What a developer focuses on while writing code is mostly ideas developed in the last few years. Although you think you're building a simple app with 3 devs, what you're missing is you have your own tiny research lab studying how to develop this simple app the cheapest way possible while making it maintainable.

* Software by its very nature is hard to make money off of. Its complexity is opaque to most people, they're not willing to pay. You'll always have people pirating it, eating away from your bottom line. Moreover, each new software means changing workflow, so even if you have the best product on the market, decent amount of people won't switch from the industry standard.

* Modern software engineering methodology focuses on, among other things, time to ship, feature richness and maintainability. It does not focus on correctness -- partially because our theories on software correctness are lacking (even if you decide to use novel/extreme approaches such as Dependently Typed Programming, formal proofs etc it's unclear/unknown if you'll reach a significantly better correctness metric). This makes your product inherently frustrating to the customer. No matter how much money you spend, you'll always have a product that's a little bit buggy. This means the product is very sensitive to the amount of money you throw at it. If you throw Apple level of money, it'll be less buggy, if you have a barebones team it'll be more buggy.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#198

Post by ysavir »

cscheid wrote: post #176
ysavir wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle requests from all your users, and more users means more requests to handle. But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? Yes, havi…

> how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? _very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you. > Do they make the product unprofitable or unsuccessful in anyway? You do your engineer best…

> _very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you.

Can you provide some examples of this? I'd like more info here, because off of the top of my head, I can think of the following counter-examples:

1. This isn't a new problem. User environment has been an issue ever since software as an industry was born. Specifying minimum specs is a pretty typical thing. And while I don't have depth of knowledge on these challenges or their history, my understanding is that it's only become less of a factor over time. So why is digital software different in this regard? If the industry was able to sustain itself before it went digital, what about the change to digital makes it unsustainable now?

2. Computer games, which are probably a good candidate for the most resource-heavy programs that need an appropriate environment, still largely adhere to a pay once business model. Doesn't this indicate that offline experiences aren't affected by environment to such a degree that a single payment business model isn't problematic?

> You do your engineer best to try and fight that. But there's absolutely a marginal cost, which is what I was responding to.

It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost significant, is the question. In particular, significant enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#199

Post by andruby »

I don't understand the "economic" model.

If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that means I can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to everything from all developers of this "platform"?

The example on [0] where a developer pays credits when they get a subscriber is confusing. Should Devs "top up" somehow?

[0] https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works

Re: A world where people pay for software

#200

Post by hooverd »

zer8k wrote: post #133
chadash wrote: post #28

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale bu…

SaaS works when not everything is atomized into micro-profitable businesses. The problem with SaaS is it enabled subscription hell and destroyed ownership. When I buy software I reasonably expect to own my copy. No different than when I go to the store and buy a book, or buy a CD of music, or buy food. With SaaS I own nothing. My data is theirs. My stuff is theirs. It is no different than your example where software…

You can add Alibre to that list. They do the JetBrains perpetual license plus N years updates for CAD software.
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