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Why did you chose to sell your software versus a subscription model? Was it just easier, or did you do research and find that selling was more profitable?

bluecalm 10y ago
I tried to do research by asking more experienced people in the niche. I've got many conflicting suggestions and advice so I went with my gut feeling. I felt there was some reluctance in the gambling world against subscription model and I felt one time fee would maximize chances to get it going. As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were: -everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive) -people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could). It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).
- sputknick 10y ago
  I had not considered the issue of trust in the cloud. I know that I trust privacy in the cloud, but I had not considered that customers might not.

bluecalm 10y ago

I tried to do research by asking more experienced people in the niche. I've got many conflicting suggestions and advice so I went with my gut feeling. I felt there was some reluctance in the gambling world against subscription model and I felt one time fee would maximize chances to get it going. As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were: -everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive) -people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could). It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).

sputknick 10y ago
I had not considered the issue of trust in the cloud. I know that I trust privacy in the cloud, but I had not considered that customers might not.