

Ask HN: Alternatives to selling desktop software - SvenAndersson

Good morning HN!<p>I&#x27;ve been developing (~5 months) a cross-platform (OSX, Win and Linux) desktop application, as an after-work-hobby-project, that is soon nearing alpha state.<p>Up until now I have mostly kept on coding since it&#x27;s something I personally have a need for, and it&#x27;s a fun project, but I also believe there is clique of other people that would find it useful as well. I would love to have other people use it, but I don&#x27;t think there is enough of a business there to actually sell it, at least in its current form. [1]<p>I like the &quot;hobbyish sharewarey business&quot; of how Sublime Text started out, and I think my application cater to much of the same audience. But I feel I would not be able to give support or have time to go all in on this project at this stage, having a real job as well.<p>What are my options to distribute my software, even at an early stage (alpha&#x2F;beta), without going full business and still be a at least a bit profitable?<p>Donation-ware? Patreon? Would love some data!<p>---<p>[1] There are other both big and small company alternatives, there are also some open source (imho shitty) alternatives. The closed source alternatives come in both subscription and one-time-license models. These alternatives also have much more features of course (but so does Visual Studio compared to Sublime Text I guess... :-) ).
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mherrmann
Firstly, I hope for you that your project becomes popular enough so you can
make money with it in theory.

When that happens, I would suggest going the way of Sublime Text: Unobtrusive,
friendly reminders asking the user to purchase the software. From my own
experience I know that it's difficult and extremely tedious to implement a
copy protection scheme because it involves a whole lot of things you don't
think of at first: how do you ensure that your license keys aren't posted on
the internet? Does the customer need internet access to activate a key? What
if the customer complains that the license key doesn't work? What about new
versions of your software? Keep it simple.

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amorphid
I paid for Sublime Text to make the annoying "buy me" message go away. I
probably wouldn't have paid if it didn't nag me, and I never would have tried
it if it weren't freemium.

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meir_yanovich
I love to hear also , I love desktop apps I wish it will do comeback soon. I
will be happy to hear about more developers working on desktop apps

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andersthue
I started by creating a free version of my Windows software and when it was
more mature and had some traction, I added some more advanced features and
stared charging.

Now it is a nice side income that helps me bootstrap my SaaS app :)

