3 ms·

What software would you pay for?

• izaidi 18y ago
  I'd pay $20 per month for FFFFOUND, because of the high quality of the community.
• davidw 18y ago
  I'm an open source junkie, so I wouldn't pay money for much of anything. I've "paid" by contributing back (mostly in very small ways) to a lot of projects though.
  • SwellJoe 18y ago
    This is a position that I've mellowed on, over the years. I've been working on almost nothing but Open Source software for over ten years now, and I prefer Open Source solutions when such exists (and I find a very large majority of proprietary software distasteful...stuff like Mac OS X, Windows, etc.), but if there's clearly a solution to a problem I'm having, I'll buy it without hesitation. The annoying thing, to me, isn't that it's not Open Source...it is that most proprietary software is of exceedingly poor quality...and so I find myself regretting it quite often. For example, there are no Open Source Blu-Ray players, and so my options are three or four simply horrible proprietary products. The best of them is bad, and the worst is intolerable. But, as an Open Source and proprietary software developer, I'm perfectly happy with our Open Source users never buying our proprietary products--if they're contributing on the mailing lists or sending in a patch or a good bug report now and then, they are paying their way.
• SwellJoe 18y ago
  We pay $49.95/month to PayCycle for payroll service. I don't love it, but it does the job reasonably well. We pay for RHEL on our primary server (indirectly...it's included in the dedicated server we have). I donate $100/year, or so, to the ICCCF because I love vim. We sponsored the YAPC::NA because we use Perl extensively. I've bought a couple of games, and Windows Vista for an HTPC to go with a giant TV my girlfriend bought a few weeks ago. I pay $14.95 per year for Maxemail, a fax gateway service, which freakin' rules. I send maybe five faxes per year, and receive about twice that many. It's simply wonderful not having to have a phone line and a fax machine sitting around for those few occasions--I have a scanner for signed documents. I've used this service for six or seven or maybe even more years and cannot say enough nice things about it. I tried Efax before Maxemail, but had some sort of issue with using it from Linux, and so I switched almost immediately. We pay for AdWords and AdBrite and Yahoo search marketing. I dunno if that counts...but I am partly paying for the tools they provide for placing, bidding, and monitoring ad campaigns. We're paying about $3500/month in advertising, these days, though that'll double+ next month when we launch a new product. We've paid 99designs.com for logo contests...and all have turned out great. They've raised prices several times since I started using them (when it was SitePoint Contests), and it's beginning to annoy me, so I'll try an alternative in the future. It's up to $39 now just to list the contest--some things (like getting a couple of icons drawn) don't even need a prize much bigger than that! They've become too impressed with themselves. This is an area where competition would be welcome...though I wouldn't want to be the company trying to compete solely on price. I'm sure there are other designer-focused communities that can step up to the plate with a better price while still bringing other benefits to the table. I pay for Emusic. I have the biggest monthly plan they offer and I pay annually, because I love Emusic and have no reason to believe it'll ever disappoint. I've been a subscriber since the first year of operation, because they were the only music service offering DRM-free MP3s that would play on my Linux desktop. Cannot say enough good about Emusic. "A+++ Would buy from again" as they say so eloquently on eBay. That's all that comes to mind.