7 ms·

When searching for the crack, it means someone thinks that the software isn't worth the value being asked (or they might not have any way to pay). The honeypot

• kkirsche 10y ago
  This is accurate and the best option in my opinion
• superasn 10y ago
  While I agree with your ideas but isn't giving them a discount = rewarding bad behavior? It just gives the wrong idea and is unfair to other customers.
  • jimmies 10y ago
    Companies selling stuff much more expensive for the early adopters because they know the customers are willing to pay for it. As long as you're making profit, you should sell to everyone at the maximum price they're willing to pay for. Selling something = maximizing profit or sales, not "making it fair for everyone." You'll see it a lot of that in Kickstarter's tiered-reward structure or processors being sold nowadays. If a person values my software at $100 and 5 others value it at $20, I am better off selling it for all of them and get $200. If I had wanted to make it fair for everyone I have to set it at $100 which I will get $100, or $20 and get $120. To give people the impression that I am making it fair to everyone is not hard. I just produce different "editions" of the same software. But under the hood, I don't think it is about making it fair.
    • jcoffland 10y ago
      Selling the same thing to different groups of people at different prices is called price discrimination and can be illegal.
      • tormeh 10y ago
        No. It's called Windows Home and Windows Professional.
      • waqf 10y ago
        That's true, but selling marginally different "models" or "editions" of the same thing, in the hope that people will self-select according to their budget, is called market segmentation and is ubiquitous across many different industries. It's not discriminatory, because you allow any customer to buy any product they wish.
      • epistasis 10y ago
        Interesting, where is this illegal, and what aspect of it makes illegal? In the US it's extremely common in the form of student or senior citizen discounts. Nearly all airline tickets seem to be sold at very different prices for exactly the same good. As for most business to business transactions that involve a sales team, consistent pricing for identical products and volumes would be the exception to the norm for most industries.
        • jcoffland 10y ago
          https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/price-discrimination-robinson-patman https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... In order for substantive portions of the Robinson-Patman Act to be invoked, there must be: * two or more sales must have been consummated * in a reasonably close time period * of commodities of like grade and quality * with a different price * by the same seller * to two or more different purchasers * for use, consumption, or resale within the United States * which may result in competitive injury.
• beejiu 10y ago
  I disagree. If the 'customer' has gone as far to search cracked version, they obviously do see the value in the software. I'm sure everybody sees the value of Microsoft Windows, but there are certain parts of the world where nobody pays for it. Many newspapers are still sold using the honor system (collect a newspaper, put the money in a pot). In such a system where it is easy to steal (which is similar to software piracy), there are many people for who 'opportunistic theft' is a default behavior.
  • jimmies 10y ago
    > If the 'customer' has gone as far to search cracked version, they obviously do see the value in the software. I'm sure everybody sees the value of Microsoft Windows, but there are certain parts of the world where nobody pays for it. There is no dispute that people see values in Windows or OP's software, I think the better way to think about it is at what cost? The cost to go around the net searching for a cracked version for two hours until they find something that actually works, or actually buying it outright in 5 minutes. The answer for a person who makes $7.5 per hour might be different from the answer for a person who makes $30 per hour. I think that it's a reasonable assumption that at different prices, different numbers of people will choose to pirate the software because they perceive the costs differently. About the fact that in some regions, people mostly pirated: I was in one of those third world countries. It wasn't because there weren't people who aren't willing to pay for it, it was because, for 99% of people, there was no way to pay for it. In which case, telling the person to pay anyway like OP did wouldn't help. Moreover, it is a feedback loop too, because when you're in those places, pirating is the norm and a person don't have to search for the net for 2 hours to do it, they walk 2 steps to a CD stand that offers it. makes it much more _economically sound_ (not only in the monetary sense). In which case you will have to have a very strong incentive to make people switch to a legitimate system. But that is not impossible -- if Windows was free to get in those places, then do people still go through the pain to use GNU+Linux? It turned out that people still did because Linux provides something Windows doesn't. What can you provide in those places to get people who can afford the software to start using the legit version of your software?
    • Swizec 10y ago
• seanwilson 10y ago
  > When searching for the crack, it means someone thinks that the software isn't worth the value being asked Why would you think that is true in general? People even pirate $1 phone apps. Someone can think an app is worth the money but would still rather take it for free if they can get away with it. If they're taking the time to pirate the app and use it then it's presumably worth something to them.
  • jimmies 10y ago
    >If they're taking the time to pirate the app and use it then it's presumably worth something to them. There is no dispute that they see the value in being able to use the software. The question is at what cost? In economics terms, pirating costs the person too (time to find a working crack+frustration+malware risks+no updates/support). If a person chose to pirate it, it means that all those costs they have to pay by pirating have to be perceived to be less than the cost to get a software license. In rare cases it might not be true, for example, people in third world countries might not be able to pay, or people who have the habit of doing that. But that, in general, I believe is true. I think it explains a lot how people don't generally pirate movies and music nowadays. Streaming and buying it legit is the lesser cost to pay. People pirate $1 games because people who have time to play games often have a lot of disposable time, including time figuring out how to pirate games.
• tlogan 10y ago
  I'm not 100% sure what is your experience with others but these kind of people are pathological customers. At least in my business. You can test this by adding something like this to your honeypot page or home page: if you have do not financial needs or you are student please email us and we can discuss how to you can get software at discounted rate or free. And you will get just bunch of hate emails. And we even decided: "who ever writes us an email that email contains "thank you" to "please" phrase (or nice in any other way) they will get our service for free". Just that: just be nice and you will get it free. And you know what: you will get maybe two or three emails in a year which have "thank you" or "please" in the email. All other emails will be rude emails demanding something. Like "I'm retired I do not have money to pay for your shit. Give me free or fuck yourself" (actual email).
  • jimmies 10y ago
    Or maybe when they searched for a crack and found your smug page, they get pissed because they were trapped, and some get even more pissed when they were instructed to beg for a license. I wonder if you see a difference if you just put out a button on the page (that is not searchable by an engine) with a 75% off coupon, so they feel like they 'saved' the money by just being smarter than other people. To you as a software developer, I don't think it will hurt the business because those are the ones that aren't going to pay the full price anyway (and because the coupon cannot be shared/searched as a standard discount, you won't risk people who are willing to pay the full price).
    • tlogan 10y ago
      We had it on pricing page. But it does not matter - because that is not the point. You should not have these kind of people (rude, pathological, etc.) as customers because they will hurt your business. If you cannot get money from somebody at least that person needs to be nice so that your support is not stressed out, you have pleasure working with that person, etc.
      • jimmies 10y ago
        If you don't want them as your customers in the first place, then why bother setting up the honeypot to trap them and convince them to pay?
• Veen 10y ago
  To me this seems like an odd way to approach customer acquisition. If I offer a service or product to what I assume are reasonable, rational, intelligent human beings, the deal is this: you pay me what I ask and you get the service I'm offering at that price. No other deal, accommodation, or offer is on the table. My services don't include being your therapist, your mother, your whipping boy, or anything other than a person who will sell you a product or service and treat you with the respect you're accorded as a fellow human being in the world. Your status as a customer gives you no more rights than that. You are not, by virtue of being my customer, excused the normal standard of interaction with a social equal. You are not entitled to take my offering without recompense. You are not entitled to abuse me or in any other way behave in an uncivilized manner. If that arrangement is not amaenable to you because you suffer from a deficiency of character or intelligence, that's not something I feel obligated to accommodate.
  • hermitcrab 10y ago
    I sympathize with your view. I think this approach would be fine in a world with 'good guys' who always pay and 'bad guys' who never pay. But many people fall on a bell curve between these 2 extremes (this is backed up by the work of Dan Ariely on honesty). And some these people on the curve might 'do the right thing' with a nudge in that direction.
    • slv77 10y ago
      Back in the day I sold shareware which used successive keyed hashes to generate the registration key. While they key generator used all the keys the software only validated against the first n keys. When the software was inevitably cracked and a key generator was published the software would be updated to validate n+1 keys which would render the cracked keys unusable. This left hundreds of pages of invalid keys across various crack sites with no way for anyone searching on Google to separate the needles from the haystack. The software phoned home during the registration process as well and our analytics showed that 30% of our paying customers had gone to one or more crack sites and attempted to enter a product key before eventually deciding to purchase the software. This was a utility in the $20 to $30 dollar range so cost wasn't a major factor.
• Endy 10y ago
  How about a link to alternativeto.net? You may lose a user, but you will direct them somewhere legal.
• closeparen 10y ago
  Or it means the customer is a teenager for whom the quoted price might as well be "infinity dollars." Even if affordable, they probably don't have a way to make electronic payments without involving parents, and that's icky. 16-year-old me wanted to use professional media production tools. The combined price of Creative Suite, Logic Pro, and Final Cut was more money than I had ever seen in my life. That didn't stop me. In college, I finally got legitimate access via site licensing and media computer labs. Lost it when I graduated. As a working professional (not in media production), if the need came up I'd pay for any of those products easily.
  • dawnerd 10y ago
    I got my start using pirated Macromedia and Adobe products and now I'm a full paying customer. Product suits like this would greatly benefit from giving schools access to free student licenses to get young people hooked and trained on their products so when they enter the workforce they're ready to pay for it.
    • Klover 10y ago
      Or even better: the Microsoft approach of giving students everything for free, so there's no reason for colleges not to use Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, C#, you name it. They're all good products, so there's little reason not to use all this free Microsoft software and teaching material. I don't think I've seen many European IT college graduates who weren't basically Microsoft schooled, with a small side of HTML and Java. Of course, computer science is a little more agnostic. Universities in general are, where they even accept digital documents that are PDF. But Microsoft's model seems to be very effective. It doesn't cost them anything to give people something they wouldn't be able to pay for, and it gets them, like you said, hooked and trained.
• bpodgursky 10y ago
  > it means someone thinks that the software isn't worth the value being asked Um... or it means, that it means that (utility - list price) < (utility - FREE). If there are no consequences, a HUGE number of people are happy to just get something for free. And frankly, with enforcement near 0, it's a logical conclusion. It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with your price. It means people are happy to steal if they won't get caught.
  • jimmies 10y ago
    I think it's more like (utility - list price cost) < (utility - finding a crack cost) Finding and using a crack is does not cost nothing, it takes time and effort. In the past it might have been easier, nowadays it's very hard to be able to download a legitimate crack .exe file over HTTP. It's almost guaranteed that the file is a malware or adware. Do people know that? I think unless this is the first time they pirate something, they know. Sure - it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the price. It means that the people who choose to find a crack think their time and safety is worth trading for not having to pay for your software. It means that some of them might buy it if they see a lower price.
• andersonmvd 10y ago
  Valid point, but searching for the 'cracked' version could also be cultural. It's not like people could not afford, they would prefer to 'feel smart' by having the cracked version instead. For that sake, this 'honeypot page' is good, but could include more info on why paying is so important to keep the lights on.
• elastic_church 10y ago
  They were never going to buy a single license or in some cases an additional license There are a lot of apps that make you buy a license for pc and your mobile devices Aggravating
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Buge 10y ago
  He says he gets conversion sales from the page. So some people searching for the crack must find it to be worth the price.