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Software The Almighty Buck

Selling Software - Shareware, Piracy, and Profit? 105

Posted by Cliff from the this-part-of-the-industry-is-not-for-the-faint-of-heart dept.
qjereq asks: "A few months after being laid off from a large corporation early last year, I decided to create some image browsing software to sell on the web and, perhaps later, in stores. Unfortunately, besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products, I have found that the bulk of my product's downloads come from pirate web sites. I have tried unsuccessfully to make my software hack-proof. I have also looked into selling the product in-stores, but I have only heard bad things about this including the possibility of having to eat the cost of returned merchandise. I am running low on cash and am on the brink of giving up, but I know that the product is good. Do any Slashdot readers have any success stories about how they were able to make money by selling software? My product is currently sold as Shareware. Should I consider a combination of Freeware and a Full Version? Is it worth the hassle of trying to get onto store shelves? Help."
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Selling Software - Shareware, Piracy, and Profit? More

Selling Software - Shareware, Piracy, and Profit?

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  • Have your considered... (Score:5, Funny)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @01:35PM (#6833743)
    posting to well known websites populated by nerds. Perhaps some of them in sympathy will buy your software?

  • Not to be discouraging ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RedDirt ( 3122 ) * on Saturday August 30, 2003 @01:36PM (#6833750) Homepage
    There is no way to create a "hack-proof" piece of software. If you have an interesting program, people will figure out a way to unlock it. If you make two different versions available (lite and registered) then the warez sites will make the for-pay version available. *shrug* There's not a darn thing you can do. You can make it difficult, but in the end, the energy spent making the product hard to crack would be better spent on making the product better. Not until we have DRM integrated into the hardware of everone's PC will we be able to fix that particular problem.
    • It's a shame that there are so many uninformed moderators in the system. The point that this guy makes is perfectly true - it will be impossible to secure software from hackers until DRM is in a system. Now, there may be many other bad things about DRM that most slashdot readers don't agree with, but mod'ing this guy as flamebait because of your view just means that you're abusing the system. Meta-moderators take note.
    • Who the hell modded this as flamebait? what the hell are you smoking?

      This is exactly my feeling on the matter, it's the pure truth and there's nothing flamebait-ish about it at all.

  • it might not be the best idea asking for help from a site known for it's advocacy of open source software...

  • hack proof (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @01:48PM (#6833818) Homepage Journal
    There is another theory which says that one of the main reasons for hacking software is because of the challenge of beating the software's protection, and that posting it to the pirate sites is done more for the bragging rights than to let people have the software for nothing.

    If this is true, putting in ever more complex protection schemes will have no effect, other than to make the software an even more interesting target for the hackers.

    Hmm.... sorry to sound cynical. :-/
    • You are so right. I have used at least 3 different protection mechanisms. It took crackers nearly a month to crack the last one and I got an anonymous e-mail as soon as they did.

    • Re:hack proof (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Olathe ( 628659 ) on Sunday August 31, 2003 @02:31AM (#6836803)
      I suppose you could make it incredibly trivial for crackers to break, but hard for the average user. Maybe, in the binary, put "Copy protection: y". How many average users would be able to edit a binary without ruining it ?

      Then, if a cracker posted it for bragging rights, people could laugh, removing that incentive.
  • I have also looked into selling the product in-stores, but I have only heard bad things about this including the possibility of having to eat the cost of returned merchandise.


    Simple solution. No returns on opened packages. If it's unopened, then the store can just reselve it, up one for the invintory, and then sell it to someone else.

    Besides, I don't know of ANY store that will accept returns on digial media.
    • Actually, I meant unsold merchandise that is returned to me by the store. Apparently, there is a good (bad) chance that some of packages may not sell and I will have to try to sell them through a different store or let them rot.
      • If you intend to sell your product at any store larger than the Joe's Corner Computer Mart, you'll have to get a barcode for it. This is not cheap (a few thousand dollars, as I recall). Further information is available here [uc-council.org].

        • Re:Barcode (Score:2, Informative)

          by Zerth ( 26112 )
          Actually, if you claim limited size and hardship, you can get 10 barcodes for only $375 membership and possibly an annual renewal fee(they just started a "we're a service provider like domain names, so we need to charge a yearly fee" thing but are getting sued to stop it). It's not something they advertise though, you'll have to ask for it.
      • to stay on focus, here's how this goes.

        You convince a store to buy X copies at Y dollars apiece, with 1.5 - 1.6Y as the MSRP.

        Then, someday, should you decide to discount the software, so that it costs, say Y - Z dollars for the store to buy, every store will expect you to send them Z dollars for each copy that remains unsold. This is called "Price Protection"

        Additionally, eventually (like when the product is on the $5 rack and still not selling) the store will expect to return all remaining unsold copie

  • PKI (Score:2)

    by zoloto ( 586738 )
    Give each user a "key", more precicely, their public key and sign the binary, or some other data file (that contains their registration information, including customer #, date of purchace etc.) and then the program will only run once the users valid key has been authorized.

    The .exe should validate itself, and a myriad of other application files for checksums, or some other type of authentication. Contact the home server (encrypted) and recieving the PKI gpg/pgp signed / encrypted stream BACK to the users c

    • Re:PKI (Score:2, Interesting)

      by itwerx ( 165526 )
      It is a trivial task to discover any changes to the registry/hdd etc. with any of several tools designed for large-scale software rollouts which take binary "snapshots" and compare before and after.
      The rest of that scheme can be bypassed very easily simply be running the installer through a debugger or ICE setup and/or running the final installation through the same.
      The only way something like what you're suggesting would have a hope of working would be if the entire installation program and files w

    • Re:PKI (Score:2, Insightful)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 )
      If I had to put up with all that shit for some image viewer, I'm sure I'd find a different image viewer. As he said, there are already hundreds of perfectly good ones, and dozens in open source.

  • It's a good price... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:02PM (#6833905)
    But is it too good of a price? Maybe you need to raise your prices. (Seriously) It would seem that your software would have a pretty small market, but is very good for that market. Maybe you need a price range of 25-30 so you can make a profit with the sales. Is piracy the problem? To be honest, I doubt it. I think those that are willing to support a program do it. Those that do not don't. Simple as that. Best thing you can do actually, is to create a community, if you do not already have one. Making it personal is the best way to get support on the Internet.
    • Its nice to see some positive feedback. I like your community idea. I am sure this works better with an open source project, but I'll consider my options.

      • Re:It's a good price... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cymen ( 8178 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [givnemyc]> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:25PM (#6834695) Homepage
        Have you thought about targeted digital photography neophytes? Forums, tutorials (I see you have some already), and other material could draw these people in. I've participated in a number of forums at various digital photo websites and it has been fun. I liked the photo of the day and the themed monthly group photo assignment the most.

        On a side note, what might help draw these people to your new site is your participation in other sites and usenet groups. If you know how to do this right, which I think of as being an active and useful member of the community (not spamming), you will get click throughs to your site (best with your website's URL in your sig). This is a fine line to tread and it does take time.

        • Re:It's a good price... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by cymen ( 8178 )
          One other idea -- make integration into your community website a part of your program (ie, submit this photo for photo of the day/month/?, add photo to online portfolio, etc). When the program is installed or run for the first time, make the registration into the community an option.

          This brings up bandwidth issues if portfolios are online but it might also bring up additional revenue possibilities if you're interested in providing services along with the program itself.
    • I don't think there is such a good thing as a "too good" price.

      One thing that constantly pisses me off about windows/mac is everyone wants money for *ANY* little VB app they write.

      The author needs to make it easier to pay for the software then to pirate it. But I think the real folly is this: Image viewers are mostly used by pornographers. Pornographers are already pirating porn off the usenet, what makes you think they're going to pay for software?

  • Freeware plus Full Version (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:02PM (#6833906) Homepage
    Basically, your problem has no solution. As has already been pointed out, there's no such thing as "hack-proof", the full version WILL end up on warez sites, and shareware rarely makes money. In the end you just have to trust in human nature. It's hard to believe, I know, but most people don't get their software from warez sites. In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.

    Don't waste time, effort, and resources trying to make your software "hack-proof", spend that time instead on making more reasons for someone in a store pick your box up off the shelf.

    • -In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.

      I agree, mostly. In fact I recently played with some shareware that I liked, wanted to continue using and appreciated - more than that I wanted to buy it as a way of helping them stay in business and continue to develop that line of software.

      I went to register it and when I asked how much it was the email I got back said $300. Ouch. I liked it a lot, but times are tight right now and $300 might as well be $3,000 because neither fit
      • Yikes!

        Good software or not, I think those guys need to re-evaluate their business plan. I can't imagine releasing something as shareware and charging $300 for registration, that's seriously absurd! Then again, I'm a Linux user, so maybe I'm just spoiled...

      • My rule of thumb is that if they won't post the price with the software, it's almost certainly unreasonable and it's time to look for an alternative.

        That, and this guy is trying to break into a pretty saturated market. I use gqview on linux, and irfanview on windows.
    • I would personally recommend something that validates against a database of sold keys over the network but is still fairly trivial to crack. Also make sure it kills itself after a month or so (no unlimited nagging like old school winamp or Winzip).

      I find that if a serial number is all that is needed and it is something I don't care too juch for, I will Warez it. If it becomes any harder to find then that I will buy it or stop using it.

      An example of good shareware practice was the older Opera, 30 days u
      • but that doesn't stop someone from releasing a cracked version to the warez sites. When your program connects to the reg server, it either has to modify the executable, or store some junk in the registry. Even if the program sends its serial number every time to the site, crackers will just cut out that piece of code doing the check.
  • at least if you don't want someone to make a keygen or give his key to other people..

    instead have another version of the software available only for registered users, this alone would cut the amount of freeloading(instead of just trying to find the key he/she would have to find the whole software which is generally much harder than to just find a serialnumber/key). also you should make buying much easier than freeloading(evilpaypal&etc), if it's easier to find a serial and download it than to buy it m
    • but really if you find a _good_ solution, screw your image browser, start selling that solution instead.

      I like your last comment. I have thought about doing this.
      • Yeah, there is no such thing as hackproof. The best you can do is what lmgrd (globetrotter?) does, make a weak system, sell it a lot, sue the shit out of anyone who cracks it.

        The only sure-fire way to do it is to make it personal, everytime someone buys a copy you embed their info into the program. That alone is worthless since you can binary edit it. But here's the sneaky part, you also put some ECC data in with the user data that is never touched by the program. When the program becomes pirated you can

        • ...you also put some ECC data in with the user data that is never touched by the program.

          Then just buy two version of the programs, find the differences and just clear those bits. Voila.

          • First of all, it is very easy to automatically make small changes which drastically affect the link order etc, making diffing impossible. You are obviously not a programmer.

            Secondly, if you read my post I said that the program should never touch the data and you would have to be a moron to publicisize that you have hidden ECC data in your program binary. Thus how would you know to buy two copies?

  • I think you've already answered your question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkov ( 261309 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:11PM (#6833956)
    besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products

    Well, there you have it. Why should anyone buy your software? Is it unique in any way? Were you the first to get it to market? Does it satisfy a particular niche? Is your product of superior quality?

    You're always going to have a certain level of piracy. You can see this as negative (lost sales) or positive (free marketing). Most people who pirate weren't going to pay for it in the first place. You have to hope they'll recommend it to someone who will. Software protection is an illusion that reduces sales.

    I have a friend who wrote a fairly simple utility. He did it well and did it early. He sold it as shareware (no longer though) and was turing over $500K a year lat I heard. So it can be done.

  • Don't get your hopes up. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:22PM (#6834004) Journal
    People don't like to pay for stuff. We often have to but if we can somehow find a way to get stuff for "free" we will take it. In real life companies know this and often use "free" gifts to get us to part with out money. We are greedy and we want it all for nothing.

    Very little can de done against it. So the real question is how do other companies like say supermarkets get us to pay for their products. Yesterday on my way to the dentist I walked past the back of a supermarket and totally unprotected where stending several loafs of bread. I could have saved myself A. some money B. the time standing in the que. I did not take the loaf. Why the risk was not worth it for me.

    With software however we feel that "stealing" it is not so much a problem when we consider it stealing at all. You think differently? Cute from a guy who calls his image browser software "abc" I am sure acdsee [acdsee.com] has something to say about this. Software is easily "stolen" and the risks are non-existent.

    So the answer? Well look to a different way of doing business. Opera, you got their icon on your page, seems to be surviving despite the fact that it gives its full browser away for free. Oh yeah they got add banners. Even if you are to lazy to find a serial for it you probably filter out the ads at the proxy.

    I don't think it is really possible to escape pirates anymore. The cracking has become so fast that games are out cracked before they are in stores. How is a little shop like you possibly going to compete. So go the way of some game companies. Don't bother. Quake without any protection nonetheless was a huge seller. It can be done. But try to stay away from overzealous copyprotection.

    Why? Cause the only ones you hurt with all the stuff like serials and calling home functionality are the legitemate users. Not a single company so far has succeeded in keeping popular software out of the warez scene. Not microsoft, not acdsee and neither will you.

    Concentrate instead on making the program superior to anyone elses. Then hope that enough people will simply buy it because they find "stealing" wrong to support you. Plenty of free software projects get funding without any obligation to contribute anything.

    Remember there is no law wich says you got to be able to make a living. If this doesn't pay your bills then though. Get a J.O.B.

    But the real question to you is. Did you pay for opera? Did you make a donation to Apache and all the other OSS software you are using? In short did you fully pay for all software you ever used? No then shut the fuck up. You steal we steal. If you did, then give yourselve a pat on the back, there will no doubt be a place for you in heaven, with just a little bit of hell for infringing on acdsee's trademark. :P

    • Re:Don't get your hopes up. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Catharsis ( 246331 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:43PM (#6834133) Homepage
      But the real question to you is. Did you pay for opera? Did you make a donation to Apache and all the other OSS software you are using? In short did you fully pay for all software you ever used? No then shut the fuck up. You steal we steal. If you did, then give yourselve a pat on the back, there will no doubt be a place for you in heaven, with just a little bit of hell for infringing on acdsee's trademark. :P
      I thought the whole idea behind software being Free was that payment was optional, and that no one should be coerced, guilt tripped, or insulted into paying for something they either don't want to, or can't afford.

      If you choose to support Apache, good for you. You're doing good work.

      Kindly remember that theft is not piracy (piracy is copyright infringement), and that using software which is freely given away is not even piracy.

      Cheers.

    • A can say a lot in response to the comments above, but instead, I'll summarize.

      I have purchased Opera, my development IDE, an image library, and many other software products (including MS Windows). (I have also sponsored Opera via banner ads.)

      I have not donated to the Apache or JBoss projects since I haven't made enough money with which to do so, but I have their logos on my pages to give credit where credit is due.

      You are very right about at least two things: Let the pirates have the software and try to
  • It seems to me that the retail programming market has gone much the same way as the music industry. Either work for one of the giant "studios" or struggle on your own for the love of your work.

    If you need the bread, work as a consultant. There's quite a bit of work available if you look in the right places.

    If you want to get your stuff out to a grateful audience, find a specialized field to learn about then use the newsgroups to find out just what people want.

  • they started using a key scheme that gets checked every so often against their server; when a key starts having a couple thousand users checking in, they disable it.
    • That's a very clever protection scheme. How do they deal with computers that don't have an Internet connection? I realize this is becoming less and less common but surely there are those that don't have access and excluding them seems unfair.

      I don't use Windows XP but I understand it has some kind of online registration process. How does Microsoft deal with those that don't have the ability to connect to their servers for registration?

      • How does Microsoft deal with those that don't have the ability to connect to their servers for registration?

        MS provides a toll free number for you to call to activate your product if you don't have an internet connection. If you've ever been through one of those calls, you realize that MS actually requests more information about you from the phone call than with internet based activation. I bet they're using the sale of that extra information to help defray the cost of having an activation phone bank.

        • An online activation can give them ALOT of information... Just the IP address alone is a goldmine... [possible geographical location, ISP, bandwidth]....

          Then comes the host name and general info like memory, network card, etc that might be sent as part of the PC profile... example: they might know how many XP users use AMD chipsets vs Intel chipsets... How much memory people have on their PCs; what kind of video cards are out there; hard drive sizes etc...

          Its true that the info might not be "Personally Id
      • With a telephone call. And if you exchange two cards in your machine because of a airflow issue which was overheating something Windows now thinks tht you have installed it omn another machine and claims you have to reregister it!
  • Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.

    A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.

    A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.

    I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.

    You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.

    The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.

    On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.

    On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus [cerious.com], SuperJPG [midnightblue.com], ACDsee [acdsystems.com], and many others [softpile.com] which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?

    And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article [dexterity.com] on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.

    • I agree with your shrinkage analogy, but I disagree with this.

      I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.

      I haven't ever paid for a shareware product. Then I tried the demo for AdSubtract (cookie manager / ad blocker). It's demo is fully functional for 5 sites and frankly I only needed to cover 3 sites. Then I got an email from them say

  • No offense, I am sure your program is very good. But trying to break into a market so heavily dominated by top-notch programs like ACDSee and iPhoto is insanity. Espectially without doing anything significant to differentiate your program. If you plan on continuing your current route, perhaps your next piece of software should be a .zip file manager. Or perhaps a web browser.

    In order to take something from scratch and play catchup in a market like that, you need to either significantly out-invest the other
  • Make the software trivial to crack, but put in a bit of code that detects the crack and removes vital system files from the cracker's system.

    Hey, as long as it's in your EULA, it's ok, right?
    • Whilst I don't agree with this idea, it does remind me of a game (sadly the name escapes my memory so no ref) which did something like this. There was multi-layer protection which kicked in over a period of time, so if you cracked it, it worked for a few weeks. Then the second layer cut in and locked you out. So you crack that .... The point is that you can't make something crack-proof but you can drag it out for long enough that the crackers lose interest. If your software uncracks itself over time then mo
      • Back in 1982 on the Apple II there was Kabul Spy, an adventure game which alo had this multi-layer anti cracking thing. But instead of bailing out or giving you an error the game simply went on but in such a way that there was no way out.

        Basically, you crossed a border, and if it detected a crack it threw you in prison but it looked like a normal part of the game and you would NEVER know this was copy protection.

        • That's much cooler. There was an Amiga strategy / space-exploration games called Dueteros that did something similar. To get between the second and third stage of the game you had to fight off the hoards until you developed a star-drive. Of course if you had a cracked copy ... you never did.

          Very sweet answer to the problem.

        • This sort of technique is definitely still in use. About two years ago there was a lengthy article on Gamasutra (since moved to the members-only area) from the folks that implemented the copy protection in "Spyro: Year of The Dragon".

          Developers know that a game will be cracked soon after it comes out, sometimes within a few days; but also that most of the sales are going to occur right after release as well. So the goal is to hold off and confuse the crackers for at least long enough to get past the sal

  • Choice of product? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HeyLaughingBoy ( 182206 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:57PM (#6834535)
    While I applaud your attempt to do something like this, why on earth would you develop a product for a field that by your admission is flooded with competitive (and free at that!) products? How did you intend to differentiate yours from all the rest? I can understand if this was just something you were doing for your own use and later decided to sell it, but you said you developed this with the intention of marketing it.

    I'm a bit puzzled by how you expected to make money doing this.
  • You have to face the fact that 99% of the people who would get your software illegally would not purchase it anyways. These are not really lost sales as those individuals wouldn't even think of buying it in the first place. I'm not saying it's right, but that's just the way the world works. If you want to entice people to buy your software, you should really release a free 'lite' version, and a pay version with many more features. This seems to work for alot of companies out there (ACDSee, Paint Shop Pro,
  • 1. Business is war, and it takes MUCH more than a "good" product to succeed in a saturated market. If you did not consider your marketing/sales approach before starting on development (or, better yet, before deciding on what product to create), it's unlikely you'll be able to position your product to stand out significantly from the competition now. For a good reality check, take a look at the online edition of Bruce Webster's The Art of 'Ware [thinkwyde.org], a clever and informative reinterpretation of the ancient Chi

  • I buy shareware... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) * <nowalmart.gmail@com> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @05:06PM (#6834886) Homepage Journal
    I am one of the people that pays for shareware on occasion. At present, I have at least ten pieces of shareware on my computer that I have paid for.

    Requirements for me to pay for shareware:
    1) Best in class: I paid my $29 for iCab. Why would I do that when I can get it for free? Simple - iCab offers the best feature set for a web browser. I have yet to see any web browser that offers the filtering powers iCab offers in an easy-to-set-up manner.

    2) Great software: I am currently shopping for an OS X IRC client. Right now I am using iRC which is good, but not great. It is shareware, but I am not going to pay for it since I can easily imagine a better client out there.

    3) Annoying, but not obtrusive reminders: I paid for GraphicConverter for OS X because it has a simple "Click Here to Run the Program" dialog box when you start it off. it reminds me every time I used it without paying for it just how often I was using it.

    4) Full feature, unlimited demo: At the same time, with GC, it offers all of its features for as long as you want to put up with the nag screen. Since I use a program for a couple of months before deciding if it is worth paying for, a timed demo never gets my money (it stops working before I get a chance to fully evaluate it in my day-to-day life). Not giving me the full features also prevents me from fully evaluating my need and, as a result, will never get me to pay for something.

    5) Professional company/website: I paid for a shareware type of BBEdit, and paid for the MissingSync. The web sites for these companies offered a lot of help and support, and made me confident that I was not going to get ripped off. Since I hate PayPal, any shareware that only uses that form of payment will not get my money.

    6) Unique and worth money: I paid for the MissingSync because I needed it to sync my Clie with OS X. It was the only software that would allow this (PalmDesktop now offers this built-in). If a piece of shareware competes with a freeware alternative, the shareware software had better be significantly better than the free alternatives.

    7) Good upgrade policy: This is a big one. GraphicConverter and others allow free upgrades for a *very* long time once you pay. I am not going to hand over money for v2.1 of some software if I know I am going to have to pay for v3.0 in three months and then v3.5 three months after that. I would say that, in general, I am willing to pay for a paid upgrade every two years or so.
  • I can't help you with any software success stories, but I can give you my first impresion of your product, for what it's worth- At first glance it comes across like any other image viewer, which is not good because I already have irfanview [irfanview.com], and am quite happy with it, so why should I pay for yours? Well, after going over the features, there are a couple of things your product offers that most image editors don't offer. Don't market it as an image editor. Sell it as a "Network Image Grabber". Organize yo

  • I wouldn't worry too much about pirating. Remember that 99% of those who are using it without paying wouldn't use it if they had to pay.

    I think the only way to make money out of shareware is to make it ubiquitous first, then extract the money. Really try aggressively to get it onto people's hard disks. Approaching magazines to put it on cover CDs (ideally reviewing it in the mag as well) seems the obvious way.

    Once it's well known, then try to tie it up with registration codes or whatever. People a

  • Copy protection not the answer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Krellan ( 107440 ) <krellan@NOspAm.krellan.com> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @06:24PM (#6835235) Homepage Journal

    Here's possibly one of the best sites on the net about the philosophy of designing shareware. Note that copy protection is not the answer!

    http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/Shareware1.html [semicolon.com]

    Basically, the author does triage. There are 3 types of people: those who will always pay, those who will never pay (pirates), and those who might pay. He focuses on trying to convince the latter group, and doesn't waste time with copy protection schemes that will just annoy the honest users and not stop the pirates.

    What's wrong with copy protection:

    http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html [toad.com]

    Some typical attack methods:

    http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/3030/co pyfail.htm [geocities.com]
    http://fravia.anticrack.de/advanced.htm [anticrack.de]

    You might want to read all of these before deciding if your efforts on copy protection are really worth it in the long run.

    http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/SharewareLinks.h tml [semicolon.com]

    The author of the first link has a page of more links that are also very good.

  • Sorry to say it, but from a quick glance, there doesn't seem to be anything special about your software. Whatever you think is most unique, you should probably emphasize more strongly.

    Maybe you should try and hook up with some smaller digicam or scanner manufacturers to bundle your software. I have no idea what kind of revenue ACDSee gets from each unit, but their software seems to be included with a lot of gear. High volume, probably low unit revenue, but definitely good for getting your name out the
  • Have you considered shopping your software around to various publishers? While you lose creative control (unless they hired you to continue work on it), it might make you a tidy sum, and free you from having to deal with the minutae of shipping it yourself.
  • Personally I'd port it to linux (this should be number 1 on your agenda, regardless of the rest), open source it, and leave up a paypal link on the site. Also make it a bittorrent download link so it mostly scales with the traffic.

    But that's just me, if you want to go with the sharewaare model, stop worrying so much about piracy.

    Your best off just making a token effort at preventing piracy. Piracy is the same for you as it is for microsoft, as it is for programs like winzip and all other software which

  • I had a look at the product's website. Something I thought was odd was that I couldn't find out what the hardware and OS requirements were. The page you linked to says (not very prominently) that it runs on Windows, but doesn't say which versions.

    The people who are saying that you can't stop piracy are, I'm afraid, right. Your efforts would be better spent trying to get the more honest users to buy the product. In the days when I bought shareware (I mainly run Linux now), something that always encouraged m

  • Bad Marketing Decision (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tsu Dho Nimh ( 663417 ) <abacaxi@@@hotmail...com> on Sunday August 31, 2003 @11:57AM (#6838684)
    "I decided to create some image browsing software to sell on the web and, perhaps later, in stores. Unfortunately, besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products" ... "I am running low on cash and am on the brink of giving up, but I know that the product is good."

    If you had checked the market before starting, you would have saved yourself a lot of time ... a latecomer to a crowded market can't be "good", it has to be superb. The pirated copies aren't losing you any sales ... if you had made it absolutely hack-proof, the pirates would be distributing someone else's hacked software.

    Cut your losses, consider it programming experience and start hunting up a job.

  • A friend of mine has a decent side income from some 3D modeling plugins he wrote. Here's what he does, as far as I can remember:
    • A demo copy is available for free, but it has limitations like a reduced number of objects you can model and maybe reduced options for saving and exporting.
    • The full copy is locked and requires a user-specific key to unlock it. I don't know how hard it would be to crack, but presumably not very hard for someone who knew what they were doing.
    • The program is relatively cheap (
  • if I was you, I'll put some sexy blondes into this screenshot [pair.com]
    seriously, you should entertaining your potential customer, not scare them off.
  • Wow, thanks for all the feedback, good and bad. As I write this, there are 87 posts discussing my original post and I have read all of them. Here are the main points that I have gathered (and agree with or at least appreciate).

    1. I picked the wrong type of program to attempt to sell.
    2. Attempting to create hack-proof software is futile.
    3. I should greatly differentiate my feature-set (i.e. more web-spider-type functionality), go open source, create a community, sell the product to an established company, o
    • "2. Attempting to create hack-proof software is futile."

      Cliche time. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

      While it is true no software can be hack-proof, that doesn't mean that a decent copy protection scheme shouldn't be implemented.
  • Did you look into getting it bundled with scanners, probably only get a buck or so a sale, but that would be with no piracy.

    When you said at stores I don't know what scale you meant, but a scanner vendor is probably no harder then a big store.
  • Liek the TV repair people programmers are rapidly becoming extinct. They're "elite" programming skills are rapidly becoming "basic" skill taught in grade school (BASIC is taught in my local elementry school) through highschool (Ending in Visual C++, ASM, Perl, VB, and even Fortran). Programmers are now cogs in a wheel. I just finished up transferring 900 programming jobs from the US at on avarage $40 and hour to an India consulting firm resulting in an avarage rate of $8.50 and hour. Our field, IT, MIS, etc
  • Maybe try FlexLM [macrovision.com]

    Its cumbersome and somewhat crackable but not widely distributed. Plus if it is cracked, you'll have Macrovision to fight the battle for you, and maybe to hold accountable. But it's probably way overpriced.

  • I think that on one hand, you'll never stop warez guys and other nefarious types from distributing your stuff. I just don't think it's possible; even companies that use dongles to control who can run their code are susceptible to workarounds, and I don't think you want to tinker with product activation. Even products which have successfully used key codes in the past, like Winzip and WSFTP eventually get cracked, and some warez kid tells everyone what key values work.

    So what are you going to do? You have t
  • Try here, these guys know both sides of SW cracking and protection. Look around, lots of "stuff that matters". http://www.searchlores.org/cgi-bin/search?query=so ftware+protection&submit=Search%21&max=20&result=n ormal&sort=score
  • On copy protection: The best advice I ever heard was that one should create copy protection to keep the honest people honest. A person who's going to pirate will pirate, and there's nothing you can do about it. A person who is genuinely evaluating your application may not register if you don't give them some sort of little prod.

    What I did was to limit my evaluation version to a certain number of entries. It was enough that the user could see and use every single feature in the application, yet since th

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