
Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018? - dgarud
I put a lot of thought into a software which solves a real problem and could be licenced on a per machine basis. (Small company pays less than a bigger one - i.e. pay per use).<p>To go for a startup selling licenced copies, I would need an investor but I don&#x27;t really know how much the product will sell. The investors like to see hockey stick graphs which I can&#x27;t claim.<p>I know there are companies that created open source projects on github and then have businesses doing custom work around it, but I don&#x27;t know if this will work for me. 
I feel the product itself provides value and I would like to make some revenue off it.<p>Now I am thinking this is a good fit for shareware - i.e distribute freely - let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it.
I can distribute with source so if someone wants to modify sections they can do so.<p>Please let me know your thoughts.
======
tgsovlerkhgsel
I've built a small tool that I distributed as "free for personal use, contact
me for a commercial license", without technical enforcement, not even a nag
screen.

I made one (1) sale, despite receiving e-mails from several people thanking me
that they're happily using it at work, and that sale was to a company who
wanted customization, and only ended up actually paying the invoice when they
asked for another round of customization and I pointed out that they haven't
paid their last invoice.

Donationware does not work for companies, I think - the bureaucracy required
to make money move from the company to you will keep people from doing it even
if they think you deserve it. If it is labelled as voluntary instead of a
legally required license fee, it will also be hard to make it happen.

If you're targeting companies, and want to do a shareware model, you should:

* Make it easy to buy (with credit card etc.), but also provide a contact for volume licensing. If you're lucky, this allows employees to pay you for your software without having to go through approvals.

* Make it hard to use permanently without buying (beyond just a nag screen, e.g. blocking the save feature once an expiration time is reached)

Your goal isn't to convince someone to pay for the software. Your goal is to
convince the person sitting in front of the computer that dealing with the
bureaucracy to pay you is easier than not dealing with it, and if given the
choice between a nag screen and the bureaucracy, the nag screen is easier to
deal with.

~~~
eigenvector
Companies have successfully convinced themselves that anything software is
some form of black magic that can only be procured by the IT department and
through a small army of Business Development Managers. In my job I have fairly
broad discretion to purchase things, generally up to $100,000 I need only
write a one-paragraph justification of what I'm doing as long as I'm working
within an approved budget.

Except 'IT'.

I can't buy a $5 mouse at Best Buy. Or a Lightning cable to charge my company-
provided iPhone. That will trigger long chains of accusatory emails from
Accounting and Procurement. Software and 'IT equipment' has to be purchased
according to the Policy, which to be quite honest I've never successfully
figured out how to do.

It's come to the point that I'd rather buy small things (<$50) out of my own
pocket than persecute myself by spending days going through some convoluted
process and knowing at the end of it that we paid 3x the market price to get
it from our 'Preferred Supplier'.

~~~
rusk
_.. and knowing at the end of it that we paid 3x the market price to get it
from our 'Preferred Supplier’_

Very clear what’s going on there once you get to the end. Somebody’s got
themselves a nice cash cow sewn up.

~~~
jabl
Doesn't need to be a conspiracy, where somebody is getting rich at the
company's expense.

At work we have something similar, where every few years the IT department
tenders the 'preferred supplier' for general IT stuff. The logic is basically
that by promising the vendors exclusivity, they will bid lower. So yes,
sometimes that means we'll pay 3x for a keyboard compared to the price we'd
pay at the local discount computer store; I think in general the prices for
the stuff that is in the 'tendering portfolio' is very competitive, otherwise
it's list price.

OTOH, we save money since the billing from the preferred supplier is worn-in
standard procedure, and also employees don't waste company time searching the
web for the cheapest/best/whatever keyboard.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
What's its own level of horrible is Amazon.

If you have a business account, everything gets bundled into that account.
Sure, if your org is 110 people big, keeping track is pretty easy. My last job
was with a state university. They see thousands of purchases a day, and Amazon
bins them onto 1 credit card, and in 1 account. For all 8 campuses and over
50k people.

So the preferred vendor means also integrating with your financial system. So
budgeting is easier. But Amazon makes this so damned hard. Even being able to
tag purchases would help. But I'm sure ol Besos figured out that makes him
lose a dollar.

~~~
jakobegger
With Amazon in Europe it's especially bad because if you accidentally buy
something from an FBA vendor, you won't get a proper VAT invoice. And this
makes accounting a pain in the ass.

Every other online store sends you a proper invoice. But FBA vendors will send
you sketchy invoices that make it clear they aren't paying their taxes. Which
is bad, because that means as a business customer you're on the hook....

------
mherrmann
I've been developing a cross-platform file manager [1] for the past 2.5 years.
It is shareware with a nag screen. It currently makes ~$500 per month.
Generally, I would say yes, shareware still works. But it is hard a) to write
desktop software [2] and b) to convince people to pay for it. I would not give
people the sources. It would make them feel even more like "I don't need to
pay for this". What works for me is to be very transparent and tell people [3]
"I'm one guy working on this, and am making $500 per month. This is not
sustainable. If you like the project and want it to continue, buy a license".

Feel free to hit me up on twitter @m_herrmann if you have further questions.
:-)

1: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

2: [https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/11/15/python-qt-3000-hours-
deve...](https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/11/15/python-qt-3000-hours-developer-
insight/)

3: [https://fman.io/buy](https://fman.io/buy)

~~~
charlesdm
I don't want to be overly negative, but I have launched quite a few indie 6
figure apps over the last five years, and something generating $500 a month
isn't really working (in my book).

Have you even tried to just sell licenses for it? If your software delivers
value then that should convert better than a nag screen. Worth giving users a
30 day trial and seeing how that converts.

~~~
fyfy18
Would be interested to know more about this. I see you posted an article last
year, but it's since been deleted.

~~~
charlesdm
As in, interested in how I did it? I've been considering putting something
together in the not so distant future -- throw me an e-mail with your contact
details and I'll add you to the (currently very small) mailing list.

------
Applejinx
It's called Patreon. You've got to be established, though: can't come out of
nowhere with a thing and expect to see much traction.

I literally went from using Kagi for ten years, to using Patreon. At first
it's a decimating change because you're going from 'sale of a product' to
'literally giving product away free and telling people they can support you if
they like'.

However, if your cashflow isn't too tough, one benefit is that Patreon is a
LOT more stable and predictable than shareware ever was. You stop having boom
and bust product releases and instead have months where you grow kinda briskly
and months where you grow not so briskly.

You're not making revenue off the product, you're making revenue off 'I am the
one who makes products such as this'. I've got suggestions for what people
should pledge if they would've bought my stuff commercially, but it's entirely
voluntary and I'm also MIT-licensing it all. I'm airwindows on github, and as
a website.

~~~
john_moscow
There's one big catch there - once you reach a "fair" income level, many
people will think that you are already getting enough and won't bother to
sponsor you.

Look at the statistics [0]: unless you are in the top 100 creators, you'll get
far less than your regular FAANG pay.

[0]: [https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators](https://graphtreon.com/patreon-
creators)

~~~
jolmg
Huh. I didn't know Patreon published info on what creators are earning.
Wouldn't that be a design flaw? What's the benefit to anybody? It seems to
only deter potential sponsors.

~~~
IloveHN84
Design flaw? No, I think it's called "transparency"

~~~
Uberphallus
The good old battle between privacy and transparency! Nothing better to start
a heated conversation: Finland publishes all personal taxes
[https://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/finland-publishes-
al...](https://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/finland-publishes-all-personal-
tax.html)

------
john_moscow
You need to clearly understand the difference between making money from
selling software licenses to your customers vs. having the investors as your
primary customers.

In the current market you will hardly find a private player looking for a
return on their investment through profits/dividends; they will be more likely
trying to cash out when you create enough buzz to get acquired or IPOed.
That's a completely different game from the naive "sell licenses - make
profit" option, but that's the game private equity plays in 2018. And no,
desktop applications are not buzzwordy enough for that game, sorry.

That said, there's plenty of money to be made selling desktop products to
businesses. You just need to approach it differently, get the actual
product/market fit, grow your presence organically, listen to your customers,
learn from your mistakes and so on. Don't get discouraged by bootstrapping -
you don't need a fully functional product to see if there is a market for the
problem you are solving. Create a minimal prototype, write a few articles
showing it off and tune in on the feedback. Once you start hearing from real
people trying to solve real problems with your prototype, it will be very easy
to find which next features will make your product more usable and will
inevitably bring more revenue.

~~~
marcus_holmes
This, so much. The assumption that startup == investors is faulty, and in fact
dangerous - investors don't share your priorities.

Build the thing, and sell it (not necessarily for shareware, either). There
are new channels for software now (like Setapp[0]) that you can look at, too,
depending on who the customer and platform is.

Then you can make decisions based on actual sales, demand, market size, etc,
and if investors are needed at that stage, then you have a waaaaay better
proposition for them.

[0]: [https://setapp.com/](https://setapp.com/)

------
jakobegger
If you want to make any meaningful money, you need to give people a good
reason to pay. Asking for donations is not going to result in a lot of money.
I've never heard from anyone making more than 500$ a year from donations for
an app.

So you will need to add some kind of restriction to make people pay for your
app.

The restriction depends on the usage type of your app.

\- If it is something that lots of people use everyday (like a text editor),
you might get away with a nag dialog. Annoy a large number of people just a
bit every day, and some of them will buy a license.

\- If it is something that people use just once (eg. a file conversion app)
you absolutely have to require payment before people can do what they want, or
they will never come back.

\- If is something that companies will want to customise, and you want to
distribute source code, you probably need to charge a lot of money for it.
Only few companies can afford to hire someone to write custom software, so you
need to make sure you charge them enough that it is sustainable.

------
ghaff
You're not really describing Shareware (though in practice it may not have
been a whole lot different). Shareware was software distributed under a try-
before-you-buy license but the license actually _required_ you to pay if you
continued to use the software beyond a certain time period.

Did this make a difference for most users? No. But, when I wrote shareware, I
usually got one or two 4 figure site licenses per year from companies for my
product. It was just a sideline but the difference between pure donationware
and "you're really legally required to pay for this" did make a difference.

That said, today I'd probably just do it as open source donationware though
the money wasn't completely trivial for me at the time.

~~~
nhebb
> You're not really describing Shareware

These days, yeah, but the term shareware started out as OP described. It later
became synonymous with trialware.

[https://asp-software.org/www/history/the-origin-of-shareware...](https://asp-
software.org/www/history/the-origin-of-shareware/)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Eventually it became a rather derogatory term, I remember endless debates in
the ASP about abandoning it, which I think they did in the end.

A lot of it was on the covers of magazines or you could order a set of disks
from people like Atlantic Coast:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4709059216](https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4709059216)

~~~
ghaff
The ASP at least for a long time took a hard line against crippling whether by
feature or time limiting. After I moved on (and retail software started
offering demos, open source became widespread, etc.) shareware evolved into
the sort of crippleware, adware, etc. that you still see in some corners of
the software world today.

------
eps
Go with a trial model with online license activation. This works really well.

More specifically - allow to use the program without a license for X days and
the cripple it in some annoying way until the installation is licensed.
Activation should pass some machine details to the licensing server, which
will then pass back them hashed and signed. The program should have the public
part of the licensing key embedded, so on launch it would read the license,
verify the sig and check that the license still matches the machine.

Also, for this to work _well_ you will want to have some basic protection
against reversing in place. It should not be possible to NOP the IF in the
license check, replace the signing pub key or to side-load DLLs. This is a
large subject of its own, but there are off-the-shelf solutions for this
(called exe protectors)... though the con here is the perpetual hassle with
false positive detection from anti-viruses and such.

PS.

I should add that "pay what you want" model doesn't work at all. It absolutely
doesn't work for enterprise software and it doesn't even work with home users.
It basically makes the software look not valued enough even by its own
creator.

Ditto for the donation model unless the active audience size is in 100s of
thousands. Donation model is not really a _model_ to begin with, it lacks
predictability.

Differntiating pricing tiers _just_ by the user type - personal/home vs.
business/commercial - works very poorly as well. People cheat. The only thing
that really works as a price differentiator are the features. Pay more - get
more. Also, charging for Windows Server installs 10x the normal price is a
perfectly acceptable practice that works well.

If you have any questions - ask, I'd be happy to answer what I can.

------
taprun
Donation ware is a thing, but it rarely works well. Besides, hockey stick
growth on a product that is free to obtain and use isn't a surefire means of
proving future profitability. The easiest way to make money is the old
fashioned way: charge for it.

~~~
bluedino
Or charge for support

~~~
dchest
Any examples of successful companies that charge for support for their own
free product?

~~~
fsloth
Well, RedHat, sorta kinda, but not exactly what was meant here.

------
TangoTrotFox
Look at sites/software/etc that is offered for free that you believe offer
very high value. There's a recurring trend. In spite of the value offered, the
developers invariably end up short of revenue. This tends to result in ever
more visible requests for donations or alternatives (such as swag) to try to
spur revenue. And even with these appeals, the revenue tends to rarely
correspond in any meaningful way to the value of what's offered.

As an example Lichess (www.lichess.org) is an amazing service for playing
chess. It supplanted services like ICC (internet chess club) and now competes
against services such as chess.com and really stands head and shoulders above
the rest of the sites. Now let's consider compensation. ICC had on the order
of tens of thousands of users and charged around $50/year for what would have
required extremely little overhead. They were undoubtedly making millions.
Chess.com today is heavily ad-driven and works hard to push their users into a
premium access model. No idea about their revenue, but they happily spend 5
figures a year in contracts just to get various players/streamers to
exclusively play/stream on their site, and have an extensive paid staff. In
contrast to these two sites, the founder of Lichess is able to gives himself a
salary of $22,218, about $2k above the French minimum wage. It's not like he's
then getting loads in options each year - that's it, that's what he gets for
building software that beats out other sites making countless millions
offering arguably inferior services.

It sucks, because I wish this model worked, but I think it simply does not.
There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exception.

------
peterwwillis
I don't think just distributing it for free will net you revenue. Usually
people need a reason to pay. I personally will pay for something if really
want it, _and_ I'm incredibly annoyed by the free alternative. Likewise,
someone in a small team in a big company will use your software for free, but
until they get annoyed enough by it, they won't convince their boss to pay for
it to avoid the annoyance (or gain the premium feature, etc). In this sense,
the value driving the purchase is the pain factor, not how useful the software
is by itself.

You should also tailor your business model to the product's market. If you
have a broad market - home users, small business, large businesses, etc - some
can use it for free, but some will still pay. If it's a smaller market - only
small businesses - maybe only a few will pay if it's available for free.

You can also change the business model to be free software that drives paying
for something else - like a cool cli tool, but a much more useful premium GUI.
Or a free tool that's easier to set up and use as a SaaS.

------
saluki
I would look at selling licensed copies yourself or create it as a SaaS. You
can do both of those without investors.

Put it out there for sale and test it out.

------
imgabe
Why would you need investors to distribute a licensed product? I've used a
number of programs at work that seem like they're developed by a very small
shop or possibly a single person. They perform a small but important function
that companies are often willing to pay a reasonable price to figure out.

To be specific, it's importing tables from Excel to AutoCAD and Revit. It
seems like this is something that AutoCAD and Revit should be able to do, but
they handle it very poorly.

[http://www.cadig.com/products/](http://www.cadig.com/products/)

[http://dotsoft.com/xl2cad.htm](http://dotsoft.com/xl2cad.htm)

Licenses are ~$30-50 each and every company I've worked at has happily paid it
rather than let employees waste time fiddling with the terrible native
functionality.

I don't know how much the creators are actually making, but it seems to be
enough to keep them going for the past 10 years or so.

------
abalone
“Still work”? Was there a time that shareware worked? Serious question..
citations appreciated.

Also it sounds like you are doing enterprise software. Shareware was more of a
consumer pricing model. With enterprise you want to make it totally free for
small scale grassroots adoption by champions and then monetize large scale
adoption.

~~~
aasasd
Both Carmacks had themselves each a Ferrari _before_ they put out Doom.
“Commander Keen” bought those Ferraris.

Though I'm sure it was always a game of chance like everywhere in business.

~~~
darkr
You mean both Johns? (Carmack & Romero)

~~~
tincholio
He probably meant John and Adrian... both Carmacks and founders if ID

~~~
trevyn
And intriguingly, those two Carmacks are not related!

------
8bitsrule
If it's possible for your application, you might consider offering a 'feature-
limited' aka 'crippleware'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware))
product to help you determine its potential usefullness to a wider audience.

There are a number of approaches to doing that. After getting burned a few
times paying $(100s) full-price for products just to find out that a feature I
expected/needed was missing, I stopped doing that. I've since found some
feature-limited stuff that lets me 'create-but-not-output' that I liked.

If it turns out to be a hit, you can change strategy. If the audience is
limited, you can move back to shareware.

~~~
clort
I use QCAD occasionally which falls into this category

    
    
      https://www.qcad.org/
    

The author provides downloadable versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the
source is available on Github if you want to build it yourself or provide
bugfixes or extra features. He provides some features as extensions in a trial
mode which ends after 15mins or so or you can disable them. Its pretty neat
and to be honest the price for the full version does not seem to be that much
though the community edition has always been sufficient for my needs and has
enabled me to contribute with bugs/fixes/features.

------
davidgh
I’ve been attached to the “shareware” industry since the 90’s, providing
platforms to software developers to sell their products. It’s given me an
angle of the industry that few get, namely, I’ve seem the sales number for
literally thousands of different companies in the industry.

The first thing I would say is that shareware (in the classic definition) is
not really a thing anymore, but “try before you buy” software (which is really
the evolution of shareware) is very much alive and well.

The second thing I would say is that most people would be surprised by how
much some of these companies sell. Certainly not everyone does well, but we
see small companies selling tens or hundreds of thousands (USD equivalent) per
month. Some reach seven figures a month.

I can’t think of a single company that I’ve worked with that had VC-style
funding. Most are bootstrapped with a small minority getting small “friends
and family” investments.

It is still possible to make a lot of money with try-before-you-buy software.
A few tips:

Don’t underprice. If you can provide enough value that they’ll pay _something_
you’ve got more room in your price than you might think.

Feature limitations work better than time limitations.

75% of you sales come within one day of the trial download, and of those, 75%
come within the first two hours. It’s important that the product conveys _why_
and _how_ to buy.

Don’t forget about other markets. In the early days most sales came from the
US. These days, the US represents about half. When you get traction, consider
translating your product and don’t forget to offer your product for sale using
multiple currencies and payment methods. Third-party e-commerce platforms make
this easy. They’ll also take care of a lot of the regulatory burden for you
(taxes, export controls, fraud & chargebacks, etc.).

If your product is targeted at large companies, offer premium support for a
fee. Something as simple as a “response by email within one business day” SLA
can be enough.

SEO matters a lot in helping people find your product. High quality content
about the problem your product solves helps a lot. In the early days find
where people who need your solution are talking about their problem. Be
transparent, offer genuine, non-spammy help as a solution expert and people
will allow you to talk about your product. This can help a lot as you get
established.

If someone will donate, they’ll buy. You’ll feel more benevolent asking for
donations but you’ll make _a lot more money_ if you sell the product. We’ve
seen both models. It’s not even close.

If your product is not targeted to a highly-technical audience, open source
might sound cool but means nothing to them. They won’t buy more because it’s
open source.

I could go on and on. I’ve said enough but there is still plenty of
opportunity here. It takes time - be patient. Most of the successful companies
I know started as a side gig.

~~~
quickthrower2
Great comment. Absolutely packed full of gold nuggets.

------
ezekg
Overall, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. You think you have
a valuable product, but it doesn't sound like you've even validated that
thought yet. I would do that first before getting caught up in these next
steps.

> let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it

You should only do that if you want this to be a side project forever. If you
want growth, charge people money. Most people aren't just going to donate
money to you if they don't have to. Don't be shy about charging. People who
find value in your software will pay you for a license to use it, especially
businesses. If they don't find enough value to want to pay, then you don't
have a good product yet and should talk to your users to determine value adds.

> To go for a startup selling licenced copies, I would need an investor

I don't see how you came to this conclusion. You can very easily license your
software without investors, and charge customers per machine like you
mentioned. I even built a business around that fact, which may also be able to
help you start licensing your software quickly [0].

[0]: [https://keygen.sh](https://keygen.sh)

------
wuschel
_Sublime Text 2_ comes to my mind.

------
mark-r
I worked on an application that transitioned from shareware to licensed way
back in 1998. The revenue jumped between 2x and 10x with that transition. I
can't imagine it's gotten any better in the intervening years.

------
ForrestN
Talk to ten potential customers who you know would like to use the product.
Ask them about various ways of paying for it, how much they'd be wiling to
pay, and then turn them into your first customers.

------
mherdeg
In the line of business that AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. are in (IAAS/PAAS/SAAS)
there is a related software concept called the "free tier". It's very popular.

------
monokai_nl
My color scheme [https://www.monokai.pro](https://www.monokai.pro) is
downloadable for free for Sublime and VSCode. It has a nag screen a la Sublime
Text that tells you it's free for evaluation, but needs a license for
continued usage. A small percentage of people purchases a license, but for
sure not all 200K of them.

~~~
huhtenberg
To put it bluntly and I mean no offense whatsoever - you come across as
completely nuts trying to charge 10 EUR for a _damn color scheme_. That's
basically what 200K people think when dismissing your nag.

~~~
charlesdm
The fact that 200k people have downloaded it means it has value.

I'm actually more surprised 200k people have downloaded a custom colour
scheme. But since they have, I don't think 10 EUR is excessive to charge for
something like that.

~~~
abcd_f
They downloaded it because it was free.

Its value is in the fact that it's free.

------
reacweb
At my company, they want to pay for software so that they can ask support or
blame someone if something wrong happen. I think, the best license is:
expensive commercial license (to be taken seriously), free license for
personnal use (to be appreciated by developpes), free time limited commercial
license for software evaluation.

------
dgudkov
>let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it.

Don't rely on altruism to be a good indication of real demand. People like to
get good deals. When you get for free something that is of good value -- it's
a good deal and most people will go for it.

The freemium model would work better to estimate demand.

------
tonyedgecombe
>let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it

Just make a time limited trial, if they feel it is worth paying for then they
will buy, if they don't then you don't owe them anything.

------
clatan
How about an evaluation period. People still do that.

------
tokyodude
Is SublimeText an example of successful shareware?

------
matt_the_bass
Can you make this a SaaS? That might be easier.

------
xiconfjs
shareware...even better with SALTO (selling digital secured locks): you can
"try" their web based control software for 90 days...but you have to pay $150
for it.

------
arrty88
Define work

------
bhengaij
Honestly- just use UWP and sell on windows store. Hacker news is believe it or
not, a very niche space with very few employees of big enterprises except the
popular ones. You wont get to hear from the regular it worker here

~~~
jchw
Why UWP? Who buys from Windows Store?

Not my parents. They started computers with buying software in boxes, but in
the modern age almost all of their digital purchases are done on smartphones.
Neither of them have any idea what Windows Store is. One of them uses Steam
for games.

Not most power users I know, most of which bawk at UWP apps and the concept of
a walled garden store on their desktop computer. Many power users are more
likely to use Steam to buy apps despite it being gaming focused.

Anecdotally I see basically no group that would prefer Windows Store except
out of ignorance or necessity. Buying on Windows Store means you don't get the
Mac version if one exists. Admittedly, the same caveat applies in reverse to
the more successful Mac App Store, but it's still something people have to
consider.

Microsoft has been pushing Windows Store pretty hard for a long time. They
came to my University back when I was in college, a bit after the Windows 8
launch. They talked numbers but only in terms of the whole Windows install
base and not even Windows 8 adoption. Definitely no numbers on Windows Store.

To this day, I don't know if we've seen good stats on how much apps that were
built and sold exclusively on Windows Store have fared. No doubt games have
sold well - Microsoft can use its Xbox brand to deliver exclusives to Windows
Store and not Steam - but I sincerely and absolutely doubt that success will
translate to app developers.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Windows Store apps are (relatively) sandboxed, and go through an approval
process. For the average user, it is generally safe to let them know they can
install anything they want off of it. This isn't true of most other places on
the Internet, including some more poorly managed walled gardens. I've done a
lot of support for senior citizens, and when they're looking for say, a card
game, the Windows Store is _fantastic_.

I use probably about a dozen Windows Store apps with some regularity, though
being in IT and dev, I obviously use a lot of apps outside of it as well. But
while I rarely will install a traditional app from a no-name developer for
fear it might do bad things to my system, I am pretty willing to try new UWP
apps.

That's the key perk for someone just starting out/trying to make a living off
small software offerings. The sandboxing offers a stand-in for
trustworthiness. And of course, you don't have to stand up your own licensing
servers, pay for bandwidth from downloads, etc.

~~~
jchw
Sandboxing is a useful property, but do Desktop Bridge apps even get
sandboxing? If not it calls the whole thing into question. Android has an app
store with _mandatory_ sandboxing and you can't always trust it, even Apple
with probably the most strict rules and review process have had some
incidents.

I would like sandboxing in general, but as a feature of Windows Store it's
definitely not enough to win me personally over.

I still remain unconvinced of the prominence of Windows Store and if I were to
sell an app today I would guess mobile is the way to go followed by probably
Steam or Mac App Store.

Sidenote: it feels like you're more likely to get annoying ad supported
software from app stores too. Even the built-in solitaire is ad-ridden!

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Desktop bridge apps can request "full access" permission, which effectively
evades sandboxing, but those apps are heavily scrutinized on review. In
comparison, the Play Store has no manual approval process and an automated
malware scanner that's industry-worst according to independent review. ;)
Apple does a pretty good job though, and would be my general recommendation
for mobile security.

Note that while Android and iOS both have numerous examples of malicious apps
in their store, AFAIK, Windows Store does not (though there are definitely ad-
ridden nightmares in there). I found their reviews annoyingly onerous for a
literally 50-line UWP app with a single function when I tried to submit
something.

The biggest benefit of their sandboxing though is not actually the security
limitations of what they can access, but how it's installed, and more
importantly, uninstalled. UWP apps are one-click remove, and do not leave any
lingering garbage in the registry, as they have kind of like a "registry diff"
inside their own folder.

Apps like iTunes which are notoriously messy for install and removal I prefer
over UWP because it's much easier to purge them safely.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I still find it a shame that Microsoft didn't get to succeed with Windows
Mobile. Now instead of "everyone having one phone" we have "everyone having
two types of phones" essentially. I love what Apple does because it makes them
profitable, even down to their app store. Any competitor that arises needs to
mimic that to remain profitable, I would prefer something where the main
things are proprietary but as long as the company's only focus is making a
phone OS and not an advertisement platform.

I also find it a shame that Canonical instead of redoing the Desktop
Environment for Ubuntu didn't invest that effort into just Ubuntu Mobile (or
whatever it was called) and lastly, Mozilla almost had a reasonable thing,
they really should of produced a Chromebook competitor first though. I yearn
for a sane ChromeOS alternative that's fully open source and runs Firefox by
default.

In a parallel universe Microsoft and Canonical team up to make a sane Android
competitor that overtakes the market, and build the first Linux distro to be
able to run Windows applications in a sane sandboxed environment.

------
partycoder
Pay what you want is the best model.

~~~
SquareWheel
Do you have any examples of this working successfully and sustainably for
software?

------
wizardofmysore
Have a trial for a period you think is enough for the company to know they'll
get value out of using your product and post that ask for a licence fee.

To start with I suggest you give the MVP product for free. The users will be
paying you with their feedback.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Feedback from people who don't pay anything is useless if you want to build a
business.

~~~
ahje
Even if the feedback may result in improvements that would result in a product
they _want_ to pay for?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I used to believe that but eventually I became worn down by it all. You get so
many "opportunities" presented to you that don't turn into anything that you
have to take most of it with a pinch of salt.

On the other hand someone who has put their hand in their pocket is going to
get a lot of my attention.

