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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

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Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#361

Post by mirimir »

dpower wrote: post #357
jerguismi wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say about 50% of our customers are paying with the department credit card, and the other 50% buy it using their personal card. Is this your way to determine if it is for business or personal use? Often in small companies and startups people use their personal credit cards for business purchases. Even in some bigger companies they do that, they just invoice it later separately.

We use domains more than anything. It's not the easiest thing to determine, but I'd be pretty confident in the 50/50 scenario. But I should have said that many of the people buying with their own credit card are actually purchasing for work.

Right. I mean, how many people have personal Exchange accounts?

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#362

Post by pjmlp »

dpower wrote: post #356
pjmlp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$120 ridiculous, oh the prices we use to pay in the 80's and 70's even for basic stuff like having access to a compiler. Pick your monthly salary, then imagine how many units of work you would need to sell to achieve the same value at what given price. Naturally $120 means one sale equals several at $20-$40, thus easier to achieve sustainability, given the ratio of marketing and sales team efforts to effective sales.

We tried a few price points/models. This one is what seems to work for us. Every business is different and it's a matter of experimenting until you find what works.

Perfectly, that is the point I was kind of trying to make.

It is easier to ask for a random price, without taking the time to understand that there are a set of variables associated with production cost and keeping it sustainable.

All the best to your business.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#363

Post by dotancohen »

pjmlp wrote: post #338
dotancohen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. How was that focus manifested? What is your focus now? I ask because I would love to pay for an email client that has the single feature I most need. But the Hiri website only lets me know that the software: * Helps me conquer my inbox. How? I have no idea. * Removes unnecessary clutter from my inbox. I actually don't want anything removed from my inbox. * A…

$120 ridiculous, oh the prices we use to pay in the 80's and 70's even for basic stuff like having access to a compiler. Pick your monthly salary, then imagine how many units of work you would need to sell to achieve the same value at what given price. Naturally $120 means one sale equals several at $20-$40, thus easier to achieve sustainability, given the ratio of marketing and sales team efforts to effective sales.

What well-known and perfectly adequate open source competition did your compiler have in the 70's and 80's?

We're talking about a mail client here. A $120 mail client whose website mentions not a single advantage over the leading open source solution in its market.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#364

Post by krageon »

dotancohen wrote: post #363
pjmlp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$120 ridiculous, oh the prices we use to pay in the 80's and 70's even for basic stuff like having access to a compiler. Pick your monthly salary, then imagine how many units of work you would need to sell to achieve the same value at what given price. Naturally $120 means one sale equals several at $20-$40, thus easier to achieve sustainability, given the ratio of marketing and sales team efforts to effective sales.

What well-known and perfectly adequate open source competition did your compiler have in the 70's and 80's? We're talking about a mail client here. A $120 mail client whose website mentions not a single advantage over the leading open source solution in its market.

I assume you are talking about Thunderbird? I used it professionally for two years before deciding it was much, much worse than the alternative (Outlook webmail + a gross CLI tool for other misc email). It's slow, it uses a lot of disk space for bad reasons and just generally operating on a lot of email is a massive pain.

Compared to that, I'd have difficulty believing there are many email clients out there that are actually worse. Even emacs as an email client was better (and it still wasn't great as you can imagine).

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#365

Post by pjmlp »

dotancohen wrote: post #363
pjmlp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$120 ridiculous, oh the prices we use to pay in the 80's and 70's even for basic stuff like having access to a compiler. Pick your monthly salary, then imagine how many units of work you would need to sell to achieve the same value at what given price. Naturally $120 means one sale equals several at $20-$40, thus easier to achieve sustainability, given the ratio of marketing and sales team efforts to effective sales.

What well-known and perfectly adequate open source competition did your compiler have in the 70's and 80's? We're talking about a mail client here. A $120 mail client whose website mentions not a single advantage over the leading open source solution in its market.

A few, for those willing to type them in from university, magazines and hobby club listings.

I guess sendmail and p̵i̵n̵e̵̵ mutt are good enough™.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#366

Post by lmm »

zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

In principle I'd happily pay for a good application. But not being able to use my normal package manager to install it and keep it up to date would already be imposing a significant cost.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#367

Post by zaarn »

lmm wrote: post #366
zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

In principle I'd happily pay for a good application. But not being able to use my normal package manager to install it and keep it up to date would already be imposing a significant cost.

That's not totally unsolvable. Flatpak leaves this kind of stuff open so you could implement a storefront in flatpak.

PPA's on Ubuntu would do to but other distros are less equipped to deal with it, in that case an AppImage might be better.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#368

Post by oblio »

massysett wrote: post #316
dpower wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - I'm the author of the post in question. I chose my language carefully. I do think FLOSS only is a fundamentalist position. The word is used to describe a religious believer who interprets scripture literally. I did mean to bring the baggage, but to provoke thought rather than to insult. And I must stress, this only applies to those who believe in FLOSS ONLY, completely turning their back on proprietary sof…

This shows you just do not understand either free or open source software. Plenty of companies in open source are "private companies compelled to compete in a free market." Indeed, this describes nearly all the money that drives open source development. Red Hat isn't running a charity. Neither is Google. RMS is as fundamental as they come and even he has no objection to selling software. People are taking insult from…

Red Hat is the only truly Open Source company, and it's an important part of their branding.

Google contributes to FOSS super strategically and absolutely no "magic sauce" is FOSS.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#369

Post by [deleted] »

mattl wrote: post #337
glangdale wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's pretty terrible if consenting adults choose to pay for software, isn't it? I love FOSS, but people like you (yes, "fundamentalists") can't deal with the idea that some forms of software are probably better as paid transactions between well-informed parties. The laughable state of open source office suites and any serious competitor to most of Adobe's products suggests that this model has its limits.

You assume I’m for open source. That’s the problem.

[deleted]

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#370

Post by oblio »

CMCDragonkai wrote: post #315

I've wondered how proprietary software vendors distribute their software on the myriad of Linux distros and their package managers. That is if you want to keep the workflow of using the package manager to automate the installation and uninstallation. Unlike app stores, there's no linux package manager that allows payments before delivery of software.

It depends on the application. Many either deliver a generic binary of a DEB + RPM. Or more recently a Docker container or one of the other containers (Snap, etc).

Then that has a proprietary license checker based on either a license file or a license service, basically the service phones home to check the license.

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