

Ask HN: Is it OK to charge people for my product? - darenger

I have this cool idea, however it would be a stand alone peice of software. I'm worried that if I were to sell it as is, or offer it's use as a service on a website, that developers would balk at this. These days developers are very altruistic, producing amazing free software like rails, django, mongodb, linux, git, etc.<p>It seems that these days the primary way for startups to make money from tools for developers is to force them to use storage/bandwidth/cpu on the startup's servers, which isn't always necessary. I was curious as to HNs position on selling stand-alone software, particularly if it isn't GUI heavy.
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patio11
It is unambiguously OK to charge money to people who find value in what you
produce. Many, many billions of dollars will be made this year selling
software. I don't have a stat off the top of my heads for developer tools, but
they're also a _huge_ market.

There very well might be some folk on HN (or off of it) who will never pay for
your software. That's OK. There are more fish in the sea. In particular, many
of them work at companies which happily pay money to solve business problems.

Note that "solves business problems" is much much more likely to make money
than "cool idea."

GUIs are not a pre-requisite to making money with software. It all depends on
who that software is used by and what it does. There exists a particular
company which sells 20 line shell scripts for several thousand dollars. The
shell scripts control the operation of equipment worth six figures where
miscalibration is a Really Big Deal (TM).

~~~
darenger
It is targeted at solving business problems, however it would leverage
opensource software. I look at github and I am very grateful for what those
developers provide.

But it makes one wonder, why would they give this away for free if they could
make money? I agree with the altruism and desire to give for the good of other
developers, but i feel like you could do that and make a small profit.

~~~
patio11
There are a _lot_ of people making money leveraging OSS. Github is one
example. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money on OSS. There is
nothing wrong with writing for-money software on top of OSS (assuming you
follow the license terms).

There are a variety of reasons why people might give code away for free even
though they could sell it. The most common one is that "they" are
megacorporation selling something other than code, and that investments in the
OSS are of strategic value to them even if they're non-rivalrous (i.e. we
don't need to be the only people using this for this to be worthwhile).
Selling software is also _a whole lot of work_ relative to writing software,
as you're probably going to discover in short order.

~~~
darenger
| Selling software is also a whole lot of work relative to writing software,
as you're probably going to discover in short order.

I absolutely agree with this statement. I'm curious, looking at the relative
difficulties of selling software vs. selling service (i.e.
bandwidth/cpu/storage + features) if I would be better investing my efforts in
the latter.

I know it's the bandwagon argument, but I can think of a lot of cool startups
offering tools. I can't think of any offering tools offline.

~~~
patio11
You're making a distinction which is sort of artificial.

You're selling pain relief. It isn't terribly important whether the pain
relief comes in a blue bottle or a red bottle. Your primary challenges are not
going to be the bottle. They're going to be a) finding people in pain, b)
communicating that you have something which provides pain relief, and c)
convincing them to buy it.

There are many, many reasons to prefer being in the business of selling red
bottles versus selling blue bottles, but that is a discussion for another day.
(For one thing, it is vastly harder to steal red bottles.)

~~~
darenger
Agreed, red bottles it is then :). I know the two have very different business
implications, I was just curious what HNs position on the differences were.
Thanks.

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arkitaip
Value, value, value, value. Provide something of true value and your main
problem will be how much to charge, not if you should charge.

If you're looking for more concrete answers, please tell us what kind of
solution you're working on.

------
RandallBrown
yes it is.

Rails, django, git, etc. were all developed to build something that makes
money. 37Signals was building Basecamp when rails was created. Django was for
news websites.

Rails isn't why Basecamp makes money. It was just a useful thing that happened
to come out of the development of Basecamp.

Build your product. Charge for it. If you happen to build something cool while
working on your product and it is NOT core to your business idea, give it
away.

~~~
rmc
That's one way people make money with FLOSS. They use the FLOSS code to
promote their business. That's why they give it away for free.

