

Ask HN: Is Offering Lifetime Upgrades a Good Strategy? - nyellin

Some small apps, like Balsamiq, offer free lifetime upgrades. From a business perspective, I think that this is a mistake.<p>In the case of Balsamiq, there's a constant influx of potential customers from new developers who just finished college. However, wouldn't Balsamiq make a lot more money if they sold yearly-licenses or went with a pay-as-you-go model? Right now, once a developer or designer buys a license, they can reuse the license for the rest of their career, even on new projects.
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balsamiq
Hello! We only provide "free updates forever" on our Mockups for Desktop
product. It's a low-cost tool, and I figure that harassing people to purchase
maintenance would cost us more than not doing it. That said, as we scale our
infrastructure, we might consider changing the policy in the future (for new
customers only of course).

The other thing is that Mockups shipped 1.0 (in June 2008) in a pretty rough
state, VERY MVP :) Even now I don't consider it "finished" or "implemented to
vision" yet, so I'm happy to let people buy into the vision knowing that
they'll be able to update without hassles as we get there together.

Hope this sheds some light!

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chrisaycock
Giving someone a "lifetime" of anything is a huge liability. No business
should dig a hole for itself like this.

Apple ran into a bit of trouble because they had offered iTools for free to
anyone who bought a Mac. But the costs of maintaining were high, so they
renamed it .Mac and began charging for it. (Now the service is MobileMe.)

[http://www.applematters.com/article/july-17-2002-apple-
kills...](http://www.applematters.com/article/july-17-2002-apple-kills-
itools/)

