What is the best software distribution model for making money?
- Charge one price upfront?
- Charge a monthly price?
- 30-day trial, then requires payment?
- Adware?
- Base features free of charge, but charge for premium features?
- Proprietary shareware, request donations?
- FOSS, request donations?
I understand different strategies may work better than others in certain situations and not in others, but what has worked best for your software or your company's software?
Trial ware and ads.
Sorry, I can't tell you. I don't want you to be competing with my software.
Anything other than FOSS is unethical
Patreon begging
This is like saying "what is the best bicycle?". It turns out there are different bicycles for different types of riding.
Make obscure piece of crap, and then charge money from users to explain how it works, aka Opensource
>muh fat kike ethics
t. Fat fuck neckbeard who does nothing but install obscure distros and thinks he's a 1337 coder.
I think freeware (especially Linux-style open source) has killed this model
I feel bad because I loved the utilities I used to download from download.com, tucows, etc. in the late 90s and early 2000s. many were well written and light on resources. (UNIX followers will also appreciate the fact those utilities stuck to doing one thing, and doing it well)
the only way to make money is with a huge (usually bloated) commercial suite like oracle or office.
or "apps" (featureless, virtually no settings or controls, GPS-intrusive, and ad-serving)
>- FOSS
Don't even request donations.
Monero miner
Microtransactions.
Patreon.
It is immoral to make money out of substanceless things such as software.
i think
trial unlocked all features then after trial pay based on features needed.
no decent devs will release free shit anymore.
Here's roughly the order from best to worse.
>Base features free of charge, but charge for premium features
This will get you more users and slightly reduce the chance of piracy
>Charge one price upfront
Pretty standard, works well.
>Adware
Gets you paid even if anyone pirates your software. Weak to adblockers, but you can partner with a company and use built-in offline ads (can't be blocked without recompiling the app). Can't give you as much money as simply selling the app.
>Charge a monthly price
Pretty bad payment model, won't get you as many users unless you're dominating the category of your app. So it's either here or at the bottom above 30 day trial.
>FOSS, request donations
Won't get you as much money, but the development will become faster and easier. Risk of forks lowering your revenue, so you can make it proprietary GOSS like UE4 did.
>Proprietary shareware, request donations
Won't get you as much money. Requires more shilling to become popular. FOSS is better than shareware in every way.
>30-day trial, then requires payment
Worst option as this can always be circumvented and piracy is made easy.
You're also forgetting microtransactions which can go into any of these distribution models and significantly boost your income
>What is the best software distribution model for making money?
Freemium SaaS.
>>Charge a monthly price
>Pretty bad payment model
That depends on your target. If your application is aimed at businesses, then SaaS. If it's aimed at home users, probably either ads + botnet (possibly combined with premium features), or just charging once.
Exactly. Why are you confused? Nobody will ever pay something monthly, software that requires monthly payment won't be used unless there really is no other alternative.
Yep. Work for free, let the big companies profit from it. Useful idiot.
>services are immoral
>only tangible goods have value in an economy
Foss, charge for support and consulting
ethics lol
either way, i would contribute to foss projects if i knew how because i want to know what i run.
the utorrent model
>yeah, i'll work for free
free as in freedom, not free as in price
>You're also forgetting microtransactions which can go into any of these distribution models and significantly boost your income
Has this worked or even been tried anywhere besides vidya? I don't think OP is trying to sell his game, or else microtransactions is the obvious way to go.
ENTER
PRIZE
You can sell addons for whatever, or additional features for a higher price.
based and redpilled
Is that not:
>- Base features free of charge, but charge for premium features?
I've never seen software companies sell individual features or feature sets for a few dollars each, usually it's just base features free, then a $20 fee for the rest. That's not microtransactions. That's DLC.
>Is that not
Addons/themes/etc. are microtransactions, basically. They're not always a premium feature and don't have to add anything useful to the product and can be purely aesthetic.
Ok, have fun decoding this binary that phones home user. You can do whatever you want with it though!
>distribution model
Poison distribution
unironically collect metadata and sell it
FOSS with premium support.
I wish companies still did tiered feature packages.
How often do you find an application that does what you want but charges the moon for a billion bullshit options?
>Addons/themes/etc. are microtransactions, basically.
Name one successful piece of software that has microtransactions for themes.
This is literally the standard for enterprise software. You're not targeting individual users, you're targeting businesses that want something that werks and has 24/7 tech support available.
>software distribution model for making money
change a large sum of money for it so people pirate it then sue them for huge bucks.
...
How gay are you?
Free software, but a ton on dongle dlcs
Oracle executives were fucking geniuses