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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: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:13PM
Sorry to be negative, but unless your tool does something truly spectacular, then I doubt that it will be worth the bother for most people. People who live in the command line want to install a program once, from their standard repos, and have it automatically updated. If I can't install it from homebrew on OS X and from the standard package repo on FreeBSD, I doubt that I'd bother. If you want me to pay you money for something that's less convenient than the things that I get for free, then I will just look perplexed.
The advice that I would give you is to treat the tool as advertising. From your previous posts, you do contract programming. There's nothing I've found that makes it easier to land this kind of gig than the person looking to hire you realising that they're already using and happy with your code. You might be surprised at how many people I've seen hired recently via GitHub issue trackers - if you're using someone's program, find a bug, and see them fix it quickly and professionally, that's a huge endorsement and if you see that they're available for hire then they're going to be top of your list for anything related.
I do find this to be a bit of a red flag though:
I'm not going to sell it through Apple's App Store because I don't want to deal with the sandbox.
If I'm using UNIX tools from the '80s, that kind of attitude is fine, but I'd expect anything developed recently to have the principle of least privilege in mind in development and to be able to run with the minimal set of privileges. Without knowing what your tool does, this would be a red flag when considering hiring you (it may be that it does something for which sandboxing would be problematic, in which case this attitude might be fine, but you haven't given us enough information to tell).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 13 2016, @02:12PM
Specifically, MDC might need to familiarize himself with the concept of a "loss leader": The idea is that you underprice something in order to get a customer comfortable with you and talking to you, so that you can then sell more of the normally-priced stuff. A handy-dandy tool that you've released under permissive licensing is a relatively low-cost loss leader, since all it costs you is bandwidth.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday September 13 2016, @04:03PM
My thought was that most, if not all, OSes have a method for automation. PowerShell or just shell scripting being the most common.
I'm curious about what he could be doing that's sufficiently better than the free tools available to justify paying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @12:06PM
People who live in the command line want to install a program once, from their standard repos, and have it automatically updated.
I'm pretty sure what you're describing is a person who lives in GUI, convenience or death land. Many people who do a lot of command line work prefer operating systems such as slackware that don't automatically update anything (AKA stable) and would turn off automatic updates if forced to use one of those compromised operating systems that engage in the highly insecure practice of unsupervised updates and dependency resolution.
Also most people I know who use the command line a lot are very particular about their environment and download peculiar pieces of software and extension scripts from all sorts of places and engage in all sorts of software wizardry to get everything set up just right.
If MDC's software is niche and meets a need that is not already met, I don't see why it should not sell. Not sure about paying the rent from one command line app, but that depends very much on the market, without knowing what the software is.
Anyway best of luck MDC, we are curious about what your program does.