3 ms·
Ask HN: Is Offering Lifetime Upgrades a Good Strategy?
Some small apps, like Balsamiq, offer free lifetime upgrades. From a business perspective, I think that this is a mistake.
In the case of Balsamiq, there's a constant influx of potential customers from new developers who just finished college. However, wouldn't Balsamiq make a lot more money if they sold yearly-licenses or went with a pay-as-you-go model? Right now, once a developer or designer buys a license, they can reuse the license for the rest of their career, even on new projects.
- chrisaycock 16y agoGiving someone a "lifetime" of anything is a huge liability. No business should dig a hole for itself like this. Apple ran into a bit of trouble because they had offered iTools for free to anyone who bought a Mac. But the costs of maintaining were high, so they renamed it .Mac and began charging for it. (Now the service is MobileMe.) http://www.applematters.com/article/july-17-2002-apple-kills-itools/ http://www.applematters.com/article/july-17-2002-apple-kills...
- balsamiq 16y agoHello! We only provide "free updates forever" on our Mockups for Desktop product. It's a low-cost tool, and I figure that harassing people to purchase maintenance would cost us more than not doing it. That said, as we scale our infrastructure, we might consider changing the policy in the future (for new customers only of course). The other thing is that Mockups shipped 1.0 (in June 2008) in a pretty rough state, VERY MVP :) Even now I don't consider it "finished" or "implemented to vision" yet, so I'm happy to let people buy into the vision knowing that they'll be able to update without hassles as we get there together. Hope this sheds some light!