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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#221

Post by DougN7 »

semireg wrote: post #148
throwaway204401 wrote: post #70

We sell a desktop app with an involvement in dev and support of about 0.25-0.50 FTE, with revenues in the range of $50K/month although it was launched 9 years ago and the first year was only about $2K/month. The server side is just one Windows 4GB server for user signups, billing and license validation. One good thing of desktop apps is that the server side is so cheap, you are basically selling IP. It has this featu…

I'd love to connect to compare notes. I'm well on way to $50k/month, but I have a feeling I can attain that revenue without a few of your bullet points. * B2B niche - agreed, this is essential * Viral component - I wish I could make label printing viral... but I feel like I'm dealing in the "colonoscopy of software" with my app * Only subscription - I agree this maximizes revenue, but I find subscriptions user-hostil…

If you’re selling B2B, it might be worth offering both perpetual (with yearly support & maintenance) and monthly subscriptions. Some businesses only want to do one or the other - might as well make it easy for them to give you money!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#222

Post by ThinkBeat »

I do not develop myself but there are a lot of people who do.

In Photography there are a lot of desktop apps that are custom. More now than in a long time thanks to Adobe going subscription based.

At least for the time being, in my opinion, a web-based photo DAW, editor is not practical.

I might be wrong on that already,

But enough photographers feel that way for now that there is money to be made.

The App store has some great independent desktop applications.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#223

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

splittingTimes wrote: post #102

Our company sells HW and SW for the dental sector. We have a desktop app that processes DICOM data to do implant treatment planning (where to place an implant in the patient jaw). Output is a STL file to print a drill guide for the oral surgeon to perform a guided surgery. Our desktop scanners for dental labs and our intra-oral scanners for dentists generate 3D meshes of the patients oral situation. Those meshes are…

wow. I just had a scan done a few weeks for precisely this sort of thing (drill guide), and I was really impressed by the software. But I was also completely puzzled by what the actual data input (from the wand-like thing) consists of?

Any chance you could enlighten me?

p.s. the drill guide arrived, the implants go in next week!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#224

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Mentioned it many times here of course, but I'm busy working on the Ardour DAW. It generates in excess of $200k/year, despite being 100% GPL'ed and freely available on most/all Linux distros. Somewhere on the planet, someone starts a version they got from us roughly every 2.5 minutes.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#225

Post by kaetemi »

ryandrake wrote: post #155
MangoCoffee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what Microsoft fat client technology are you using? the current problem for me with Microsoft fat client is there are too much options and no clear one that Microsoft will support long term.

Yea, I develop a hobby project targeting desktop Mac (Objective C GUI, C++ business logic) and I’m not sure what Windows technology I should use should I ever decide to port to Windows. There are so many and they are all in various stages of unsupported. C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? Maybe just give up on trying to read the future and use Qt. Fucking madness!

C# 2.0 WinForms, or Win32, for simple run-anywhere tools with no dependencies.

Qt 5+ for anything with any level of complexity. Windows has already given up on 'native' UI.

JUCE for audio plugins.

Don't bother with all the 'modern' pretend-windows-is-a-touchscreen-os frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#226

Post by semireg »

bachmeier wrote: post #217
semireg wrote: post #68

This is my 3rd (or is it 4th?) year of developing and selling Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels. Originally it only worked with USB thermal printers, but over the last few years it's grown into a multi-function image-rendering pipeline that integrates data import (via spreadsheet, CSV or API) with barcodes, text, image output. My app revenue eclipsed my iOS/NodeJS consulting in 2021 and I…

> I don't yet support Linux because out of thousands of users, only 2 people have emailed about Linux support (probably both from HN!). That's certainly not the trend. Evernote has even released a Linux app after all these years. And for good reason - the Chromebook market. Hey is another.

AFAIK, there is no support for electron apps on chromeOS.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#227

Post by DougN7 »

Osiris wrote: post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

IMHO you could very easily raise the price to $15 and probably not lose any sales. Having a low price still has to overcome the concern of trusting your credit card to some website. Once someone has overcome that hurdle, 8 vs 15 is a tiny difference. I had software I sold at $25 originally and eventually had it at $99. Also, price signals quality.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#228

Post by OJFord »

kuratkull wrote: post #125
OJFord wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it definitely not 'just work' on Linux, and the only people to email were those who saw 'on Mac & Windows' without realising it was Electron?

Invalid question. Talking to hardware devices is OS based, it can't work accidentally.

'Invalid question'? ...

Electron abstracts plenty else that's 'OS based', for all I know/knew it has/had a printer API.

Cross-platform apps are what it's about; it wouldn't be accidental. There are plenty of Electron apps that work and are packaged by third parties for Linux that only advertise (by the first party) Mac & Windows support. Spotify I think, for example.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#229

Post by DougN7 »

yboris wrote: post #106

My Video Hub App is generating about $500 / month. It's a perpetual license for $5 per copy. I am planning to create another app that might generate a similar income stream. I've done 0 paid advertising - only some posts here-and-there; I would probably have more sales if I knew how to market my app better. https://videohubapp.com/en/ - MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Experiment for a month or two with a price at $10 or $15. You might be surprised to find sales increase with a higher price (to a point of course).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#230

Post by a-dub »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #224

Mentioned it many times here of course, but I'm busy working on the Ardour DAW. It generates in excess of $200k/year, despite being 100% GPL'ed and freely available on most/all Linux distros. Somewhere on the planet, someone starts a version they got from us roughly every 2.5 minutes.

thank you for JACK, by far my favorite choice for audio plumbing on linux.
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