It seems that this post is heavily flagged. 60 points in 2 hours, was top post in front page then suddenly vanished from front page. Very odd.
Xamarin raises $12M to help you make better apps faster
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Xamarin raises $12M to help you make better apps faster
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if your potential customers demanded risk free pricing? They get to use their software for free till they start seeing value. Would you agree to that? If not, why are you expecting Xamarin to do that for you? Frankly speaking, if 400$ for a product like MonoTouch is risk for you then you probably shouldn't be developing commercial software which you sell for money.
But the corollary is the guy that wants to make a silly app and give it away for free as a hobby. For instance, I wanted to make a very particular kind of timer application for playing Diablo, primarily for myself but give it away, and the $400 price point makes me not want to use monodroid for it. Of course, I'm not really Xamarin's target market per se, and given the post I made about HBO's pricing so I can underst…
If you really want to make silly app, use Objective C + XCode. You still will have to pay 100$ for Apple Developer program.
What I have an objection to is the idea of 'pay if I succeed' model. Clearly the OP is not talking about a silly app given away for free. He wants to make money selling software but refuses to pay for tools which can help him create the software faster.
Re: Xamarin raises $12M to help you make better apps faster
#23I'd really appreciate better pricing (e.g. risk free, pay after you succeed, etc..), at least for Android platform.
Our free trial never expires and lets you try the platform in the emulator/simulator for as long as you like. As for the paid product, we issue a no-questions-asked refund to anyone who requests it within some reasonable amount of time (30 days usually). Even with this, our refund rate is less than 1%.
What I meant is actually a different business model, which can co-exist with the current one.
E.g.: "Pay only after you earn your first 100$" but along with "NO WARRANTY" and "no support" and maybe "without IDE, only cmd line tools and SDK" but that would be an extreme - still, better than nothing.
I think this will _tremendously_ boost your user base.
All in all, you will cover a new target market with retaining the existing market.
Anyway, thanks for the great product!
EDIT: the market you actually will loose (in "no support" users) - are the users who didn't succeed. Not sure if you can track the numbers, that would help to determine if this business model will be positive for you.
Re: Xamarin raises $12M to help you make better apps faster
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the corollary is the guy that wants to make a silly app and give it away for free as a hobby. For instance, I wanted to make a very particular kind of timer application for playing Diablo, primarily for myself but give it away, and the $400 price point makes me not want to use monodroid for it. Of course, I'm not really Xamarin's target market per se, and given the post I made about HBO's pricing so I can underst…
If you really want to make silly app, use Objective C + XCode. You still will have to pay 100$ for Apple Developer program. What I have an objection to is the idea of 'pay if I succeed' model. Clearly the OP is not talking about a silly app given away for free. He wants to make money selling software but refuses to pay for tools which can help him create the software faster.
There at least is a bit of precedent for it, given the Microsoft BizSpark program, and a couple of the game engines are significantly cheaper/free if the company's gross is less than some number. I'm not saying that Xamarin should do that, but it seems like making it cheap/free to lock in the codebase to the Xamarin development stack, and then having a point where they have to eventually pay makes sense.
(and using objective C/XCode are pretty much at the bottom of my list of things I ever want to do in my life)
Re: Xamarin raises $12M to help you make better apps faster
#25It seems that this post is heavily flagged. 60 points in 2 hours, was top post in front page then suddenly vanished from front page. Very odd.
Very. Any flaggers want to comment on why?