
We Are Closing Down the CppCat Project - franzb
http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0320/
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wolfgke
What they thought wrong about the student licenses is that students typically
don't spread a word, but instead get used to the software and will (if they
like it) ask their employer in the future to buy licenses for the company, so
that they can still use it at work.

The cycle from student to employee takes a few years - so you would expect
gains from giving licenses away for free to students earliest a few years from
this offer.

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hga
I can't imagine starting such an effort, in this field, while giving it only
one year to make money at net; just about breaking even is amazing and shows
there's serious demand. They really shouldn't have bothered in the first
place, especially since they've created hard feelings and distrust from the
users they're abandoning so quickly (assuming they weren't up front about
this).

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mooreds
Interesting perspective for anyone considering moving down market. Note that
they almost broke even, but that wasn't profitable enough compared to their
other business:

    
    
        During its short lifetime, this project has brought us almost as much money as we had put into its development, promotion, and maintenance.
    

In other situations, almost breaking even after only a year with a new product
would be considered a huge win, but I understand they had considerable
opportunity cost.

~~~
e12e
I also find it interesting, that as far as I can tell, the only pricing info
on their main product is that it is more expensive than $500 (the high point
to which they were advised to drop the price for CPPCAT).

I suppose it's fine to only cater to a high market from a business
perspective, but I'd much rather just have them list the price at some high-
point they usually charge (eg: 3000$/developer/year ?) with an added caveat of
"contact us to negotiate a better price".

Why would I spend hours evaluating a tool I have no idea what costs? I also
really can't stand the pricing model of pay-as-much-as-you-can -- then again,
I don't use Oracle either.

Not that it really matters -- currently I'm not their target demographic
anyway.

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chrisbennet
I just started using CPPCAT for a small safety critical embedded project. I'm
a "indie" developer so even at $250 a year it was the most expensive software
I use. [I use Visual Studio but that costs less _per year_.]

I can't blame them for leaving the low cost market. Customers with small
budgets often (usually?) have a lower ROI than customers with large budgets.

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exelius
tldr: Products that solve enterprise problems can't always be scaled down,
because the low end of the market might not have the problem in the first
place.

In my mind, PVS Studio is the perfect product for a freemium model. I don't
know enough about it to say what functionality should be put behind a paywall
(maybe a limit on the number of lines of code it can analyze?) but it seems
one of those things where you can create demand at the high end of the market
by giving the product away at the low end. If people learn to use it on their
hobbies, they'll ask to be able to use it at work too.

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Animats
It's really hard to sell programming tools today. Everyone now expect them to
be free.

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geromek
The static analysis business is really hard from the monetization perspective.

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mooreds
Isn't monetization hard for most tools aimed at developers (rather than at
companies with teams of developers)?

I think that books and book packages that solve a certain problem for a
reasonable price point (<$100) are the only developer tools that get bought by
small developers--see Nathan Barry, etc:
[http://nathanbarry.com/](http://nathanbarry.com/)

~~~
geromek
It is really interesting. You pointed that the static analysis tools are aimed
at developers but even the guys from PVS-Studio admit their main customers are
big companies with teams of developers and I agree. From my experience such
companies "force" their developers to use these kind of tools. It is somehow
paradoxical that such tools are so technical only developers understand their
results but only managers want (or think they want) to consume them.

~~~
indeyets
Pretty much any large open-source project uses Clang's Static Analyzer. So
there is a demand for such tools

~~~
geromek
Maybe you meant "there is a demand for such tools as long as they are free"...

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acqq
I've tried it and it really has some nice catches that other tools miss. Now
their PVS Studio still remains.

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MordodeMaru
Damn!

