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I'm nearing feature completion of a command-line tool that I hope will enable me to pay my rent myself. There are many services that provide online stores; which would be the best for me?
I expect to provide installers for .deb and .rpm Linuxes (Linuces?), *BSD, Mac OS X and Windows. The user will select the platform, pay then download the installer.
I expect I'll provide a time-limited demo.
It won't have DRM as I'm convinced someone would just crack it. And really DRM sounds like a PITA from my perspective. The product will be inexpensive; I have the hope that most people would rather pay than have to figure out how to download a "liberated" product.
The eCommerce services I've checked out so far enable the sale of physical products as well as Software as a Service.
I am less concerned with the cost of my store provided I can still make a profit.
I'm not going to sell it through Apple's App Store because I don't want to deal with the sandbox. I expect most of my users will be comfortable with command-lines; I don't forsee them wanting to shop at the App Store.
I hope to go Alpha in a week.
[In consideration of other Soylentils who may have a product with a GUI, or even this submitter should they decide to add one, what other store(s) would you recommend? -Ed.]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:12PM
Nobody pays for software these days.
Yeah, that's hyperbole, but I only see two cases where significant numbers of people pay for off-the-shelf software: Individuals pay for games, and businesses pay for software essential to their business (e.g. CAD tools for engineering firms, accounting software for everyone, etc.).
Otherwise, people pay for a computer which comes with an OS (actually buying an OS separately was getting quite rare even before MS finally made Windows so bad they couldn't give it away, and had to start sneaking it into auto-updates), then load it up with freeware, shareware that they'll never register, and/or pirated software.
And if Linux users need something that's not already open-source, it's either gratis (nvidia drivers, chrome, skype, etc.) or games.
As a result of this reality, there are no app stores for non-game desktop apps -- although there's a few people who'd use them, there just isn't the volume of business to support them. So everyone who thinks they're going to make money off a desktop app makes their own website to sell it directly, and it goes about as well as you'd expect.
Also, if this is actually useful, a few people will clone it under one or more open-source licenses, so they can include it in Ubuntu, and suddenly you'll lose most of the CLI-using market. Or if it's both actually useful and really hard to duplicate (perhaps you've serendipitously developed strong AI), a lot of people will use a magic script to bypass the trial's time limit.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:46PM
businesses pay for software essential to their business
Interesting concept. Assume for the sake of argument MDC has some printer utility. The headache of selling to home users exceeds the revenue generated, so license "free for non-commercial users, contact MDC for a cheap support contract for business users or embedded licensing" Now no headache from home users and recurring revenue from a couple businesses.
Hint: Market a subscription AND a support contract for businesses that do the same thing under different names. At "big companies" support contracts have to be negotiated by purchasing and need to flow thru the complete management pipeline no matter if its $50M/yr for Oracle (or whatever it is now) or $50.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:00PM
I have a subtly different point of view than you. I agree that most apps outside of games and B2B software don't sell. Having tried direct sales from binpress, I can honestly say that software does not sell, however plugins and APIs might work. For instance, it seems that if you want an embedded PDF viewer, $999 is a steal that someone is buying: http://www.binpress.com/app/pdftouch-sdk/859 [binpress.com] . If you look around in binpress, you will find the "software" section is sitting nearly devoid of reviews but the "code" section appears to have lots of usage.
I realize it is a bit late to change your product now, but realistically if possible convert your tool into a API that someone else can leverage in their app.
- JCD