
Should I give free upgrades for life? - prakash
http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/09/08/should-i-give-free-upgrades-for-life/
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maryrosecook
Wil Shipley says charge for upgrades:
<http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/4/> (He is the dev of the OS X
app, Delicious Library.)

I would say that not charging for major upgrades impairs developer-customer
relations. Without upgrades, the dev has an incentive to stop working on their
app and write a new one (and thus get a bunch more money).

I can't think of any well-known piece of Mac shareware that doesn't charge for
x.0.0 upgrades.

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patrickg-zill
I would say no, but instead give a longer-term period of free upgrades, such
as say 3 to 5 years. This is long enough to be seen as a benefit by the
customer. Saying "for life" means little when you are a smaller software
company, as most have seen one of their favorite applications die on the vine
due to the company going out of business.

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bdfh42
Why Not? We do, in one of our product areas. The software products are sold at
a fair price and most of our customers expect to use the products for many
years into the future - probably decades. Thus we provide free upgrades for
all users.

It helps on the maintenance front as well. We can "kill off" support for very
old versions by encouraging such users to move to a later one.

Some software sales models depend upon selling upgrades - alternately you
price for "lifetime use" and enjoy a long term relationship with your
customers.

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hermitcrab
>price for "lifetime use"

But how do you know how long the life of the product will be?

Also, the higher up-front cost might put customers off.

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bdfh42
I agree that in many instances estimating the life expectancy (from the
customer's viewpoint) is difficult but in others it can be reasonably
straightforward. In the software instance that we offer free upgrades for life
we are clear that our customers anticipate building and maintaining a body of
data over very long periods of time - they select our product because they are
persuaded both that our software meets their data recording needs AND that we
are going to be sticking around maintaining that software long into the
future.

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hermitcrab
>AND that we are going to be sticking around maintaining that software long
into the future

Personally I would have more confidence that you would be around in 5 years if
you were charging for upgrades.

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bdfh42
Personally I prefer new sales - it means you are still getting it right and
not milking your customers.

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sdfx
The number games in this article are without any substance, especially the
estimates for the percentage of upgraders.

Other companies are using a tiered system, where you get free lifetime
upgrades for the base version and you pay a fee for premium/business services
(Jungledisk.com is using this approach). This way you can build a (happy)
userbase and increase the trust in the company. Satisfied customers are more
likely to upgrade to a payed plan.

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hermitcrab
The spreadsheet is included. Run your own numbers.

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vaksel
I wouldn't, the whole point of software is to sell it. Every time you upgrade,
you get to sell once again to your entire userbase. If you give away the farm,
your possible market will shrink as you sell to more and more people, and your
expenses will rise as you get bigger and bigger.

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furiouslol
No you shouldn't. You are devaluating the value of your IP everytime you give
a free upgrade. There's a reason why companies like EA make buckloads of money
doing upgrades of their game franchises.

