

What software would you pay for? - shabda

On the lines of 37signals 1. Product, 2. Price 3. Profit, a question for YC.<p>When every webapps seems to be free, and everybody chasing eyeballs, What software would you pay for, say a subscription fee of 20$ per month. Why? What makes you pay for it, as compared to trying to find a free software, (apart from better functionality)?
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SwellJoe
We pay $49.95/month to PayCycle for payroll service. I don't love it, but it
does the job reasonably well.

We pay for RHEL on our primary server (indirectly...it's included in the
dedicated server we have).

I donate $100/year, or so, to the ICCCF because I love vim.

We sponsored the YAPC::NA because we use Perl extensively.

I've bought a couple of games, and Windows Vista for an HTPC to go with a
giant TV my girlfriend bought a few weeks ago.

I pay $14.95 per year for Maxemail, a fax gateway service, which freakin'
rules. I send maybe five faxes per year, and receive about twice that many.
It's simply wonderful not having to have a phone line and a fax machine
sitting around for those few occasions--I have a scanner for signed documents.
I've used this service for six or seven or maybe even more years and cannot
say enough nice things about it. I tried Efax before Maxemail, but had some
sort of issue with using it from Linux, and so I switched almost immediately.

We pay for AdWords and AdBrite and Yahoo search marketing. I dunno if that
counts...but I am partly paying for the tools they provide for placing,
bidding, and monitoring ad campaigns. We're paying about $3500/month in
advertising, these days, though that'll double+ next month when we launch a
new product.

We've paid 99designs.com for logo contests...and all have turned out great.
They've raised prices several times since I started using them (when it was
SitePoint Contests), and it's beginning to annoy me, so I'll try an
alternative in the future. It's up to $39 now just to list the contest--some
things (like getting a couple of icons drawn) don't even need a prize much
bigger than that! They've become too impressed with themselves. This is an
area where competition would be welcome...though I wouldn't want to be the
company trying to compete solely on price. I'm sure there are other designer-
focused communities that can step up to the plate with a better price while
still bringing other benefits to the table.

I pay for Emusic. I have the biggest monthly plan they offer and I pay
annually, because I love Emusic and have no reason to believe it'll ever
disappoint. I've been a subscriber since the first year of operation, because
they were the only music service offering DRM-free MP3s that would play on my
Linux desktop. Cannot say enough good about Emusic. "A+++ Would buy from
again" as they say so eloquently on eBay.

That's all that comes to mind.

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davidw
I'm an open source junkie, so I wouldn't pay money for much of anything. I've
"paid" by contributing back (mostly in very small ways) to a lot of projects
though.

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SwellJoe
This is a position that I've mellowed on, over the years. I've been working on
almost nothing but Open Source software for over ten years now, and I prefer
Open Source solutions when such exists (and I find a very large majority of
proprietary software distasteful...stuff like Mac OS X, Windows, etc.), but if
there's clearly a solution to a problem I'm having, I'll buy it without
hesitation.

The annoying thing, to me, isn't that it's not Open Source...it is that most
proprietary software is of exceedingly poor quality...and so I find myself
regretting it quite often.

For example, there are no Open Source Blu-Ray players, and so my options are
three or four simply horrible proprietary products. The best of them is bad,
and the worst is intolerable.

But, as an Open Source and proprietary software developer, I'm perfectly happy
with our Open Source users never buying our proprietary products--if they're
contributing on the mailing lists or sending in a patch or a good bug report
now and then, they are paying their way.

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izaidi
I'd pay $20 per month for FFFFOUND, because of the high quality of the
community.

