4 ms·

Plenty of people do this. Go onto any software listing site (eg. Softpedia or AlternativeTo), pick a not-a-brandname commercial product and chances are that it

by eps 5y ago

Plenty of people do this. Go onto any software listing site (eg. Softpedia or AlternativeTo), pick a not-a-brandname commercial product and chances are that it will be a single-person project. From things that are really well-polished and look like a team effort to pimped-up crappy weekend projects. Lots and lots are made and run by a single individual. Whether they sell well is an altogether different question, but it's generally not hard to make several $k per month off a decently useful consumer desktop software. All depends on the size of the niche, the fit (read, specialization) of the product, its quality and the amount of marketing effort. This business model is still often referred to as "shareware", so if you want to find communities of people that are involved in it, that'd be the keyword to search for.

mapmap 5y ago
What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment / piracy protection?
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Why bother with piracy "protection"? You're not going to keep ahead of dedicated pirates. Focus on features and bug fixes rather than going after non-customers. Every iota of effort spent going after pirates is effort not going into servicing existing customers or getting new ones.
  - eps 5y ago
    99.9% of pirates can only nop ifs. The remaining percentage are the pros that either work on paid basis or go after high-profile apps that give them visibility and status. A mildly well-protected battery indicator will remain intact for a very long time, simply because people who'd want to crack it, can't, and people who can crack it, won't. PS. Having cracked versions floating around affects SEO ranking of the master website, it affects sales and overall perrception of the product and, as importantly, it also hits support with a lot of bogus bullshit from people that aren't even customers. So for every iota one may "save" by not adding protection, they would spend multiple iotas dealing with the consequences.
- eps 5y ago
  Re: payments - it depends on the country, but generally Stripe + PayPal + bank wires for larger/enterprise purchases. Alternatively, Braintree. An altogether different option is to pay 2x the commission and use "full-service" reseller frontends like Digital River, PayProGlobal, etc. These are referred to as "registrators" and they used to be useful, because getting a merchant account and processing cards was a royal pain the ass. But now there's Stripe, so virtually no value in them. In fact, they tend to make thing more difficult to the clients than needed to justify their own existence (like requiring phone numbers, calling customers back to "verify" purchases and other artificial b/s like that). Re: piracy protection - wildly depends on whom you ask. There is a camp of people that put minimum effort (literally a a single "if" check in the code) and embrace having their stuff cracked and hacked. The logic is that this acts as extra marketing and helps converting pirates (lol). There are also people who use packaged solutions like VMprotect and (previously) Armadillo. This tends to nip piracy in a bud, but creates issues with antivirus false positives. It also makes the software heavier and more fragile. There's also a middle ground of custom protection schemes that, if deployed wisely, can create 100x more headaches to crackers vs the effort spent on coding them in. Not that hard to do, but these aren't drop-ins, obviously. Also, closely related, is the question of how the licensing works. Previously, most of the shareware used completely offline licensing using "keys" that were either hardcoded into the program or verified algorithmically (read, with elaborate checksums and such). This caused an emergence of keygens and it also fed credit card fraud with people smash-n-grabbing keys in bulk and then published them for the street cred. Surprisingly, a lot of shareware still uses this method and they still bitch and moan about the consequences. The alternative, obviously, is to use online activation. That is, what is sold is an activation token that can be swapped for a machine-specific license, via an exchange with the licensing server. This nearly completely eliminates the CC fraud and it allows for finer control over licensing. There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend).
  - hermitcrab 5y ago
    Handling taxes (VAT, sales tax) when you are selling worldwide is a nightmare. That is why many vendors pay the extra to use 'full fat' payment processors, rather than Stripe.
- semireg 5y ago
  As an electron developer I used NodeJS to implement a custom licensing system on top of JWT. My app "registers" a computer (fingerprint) with the server. The server can grant licenses where it signs a JWT with a secret key, and the client can verify using the public key. The client will enable features based on the JWT payload. Again... it's crackable, but it's serviceable and I make my software affordable through either a one-time license ($147) or a monthly subscription ($14.99/month). I try my best to make it "worth it" to purchase the app. Label LIVE is a super- boring business label printer app so it takes a "special" person to 1) need the app and then 2) decide that they'd save more money by cracking it than just paying for it. If I 10x my pricing (as my competition does), then I would fully expect users would find it worthwhile to crack and distribute.
- grujicd 5y ago
  There are payment services which were originally made for desktop apps, with built in support for license files, downloads after payment, etc. I'm using MyCommerce (ex ShareIt), but also had good experience with Avangate - which was later purchased by 2checkout, and now renamed to Verifone.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Shareware (at least back in the day) almost always had a free component. For a game that might mean levels 1-3 are free and then you buy the full game for the whole thing.
- RantyDave 5y ago
  Probably not the answer you're looking for, but the Mac AppStore is the only thing at ever truly worked for me.
  - chadcmulligan 5y ago
    Thats nice to hear, seems like a big market to me and under serviced, I'm just about to release an app on there so fingers crossed.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  Why not eliminate that and just make it FOSS?
tkgally 5y ago
There are a lot of shareware or shareware-like desktop Mac apps that I have been relying on for many years. The programs continue to be updated regularly and don’t seem to be hobby projects, so I assume the developers are supporting themselves. Some are sold through Apple’s App Store, and some are sold directly by the developer. Here are the ones that I use most and the companies that develop them: Fission; Audio Hijack (Rogue Amoeba): https://www.rogueamoeba.com https://www.rogueamoeba.com Amadeus Pro (HairerSoft): https://www.hairersoft.com/index.html https://www.hairersoft.com/index.html Transmit (Panic): https://panic.com https://panic.com Jedit Ω (Artman 21): http://www.artman21.com/en/ http://www.artman21.com/en/ BBEdit (Bare Bones): https://www.barebones.com https://www.barebones.com GraphicConverter (Lemke Software): https://www.lemkesoft.de/ https://www.lemkesoft.de/
- ziml77 5y ago
  MacOS seems to be a good place to be if you're making paid desktop software. There's a lot of Windows utilities that are freeware and of course Linux is loaded with FOSS. I only run macOS on my laptop and yet it's where I've spent the most money on various utilities. MacOS-only software I've paid for: Bartender, BetterTouchTool, Forklift, SoundSource, Pixelmator Pro, iStat Menus, Nova, Alfred, DaisyDisk, and some other things I'm sure I'm forgetting.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    The state of affairs is that Mac users are more willing to pay for software than Windows users, but not by a factor of 10, which is the Windows/Mac desktop market share ratio.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      This wikipedia page shows that it's a bit under a factor of 5 difference between the two (based on StatCounter data): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... But as you can see later on in the entry, StackOverflow's survey shows the numbers as being much closer. So your target audience matters. I'd expect that software developers aren't the only set of users where the ratio is far off of the average.

by eps 5y ago

mapmap 5y ago

What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment / piracy protection?

giantrobot 5y ago
Why bother with piracy "protection"? You're not going to keep ahead of dedicated pirates. Focus on features and bug fixes rather than going after non-customers. Every iota of effort spent going after pirates is effort not going into servicing existing customers or getting new ones.
- eps 5y ago
  99.9% of pirates can only nop ifs. The remaining percentage are the pros that either work on paid basis or go after high-profile apps that give them visibility and status. A mildly well-protected battery indicator will remain intact for a very long time, simply because people who'd want to crack it, can't, and people who can crack it, won't. PS. Having cracked versions floating around affects SEO ranking of the master website, it affects sales and overall perrception of the product and, as importantly, it also hits support with a lot of bogus bullshit from people that aren't even customers. So for every iota one may "save" by not adding protection, they would spend multiple iotas dealing with the consequences.
eps 5y ago
Re: payments - it depends on the country, but generally Stripe + PayPal + bank wires for larger/enterprise purchases. Alternatively, Braintree. An altogether different option is to pay 2x the commission and use "full-service" reseller frontends like Digital River, PayProGlobal, etc. These are referred to as "registrators" and they used to be useful, because getting a merchant account and processing cards was a royal pain the ass. But now there's Stripe, so virtually no value in them. In fact, they tend to make thing more difficult to the clients than needed to justify their own existence (like requiring phone numbers, calling customers back to "verify" purchases and other artificial b/s like that). Re: piracy protection - wildly depends on whom you ask. There is a camp of people that put minimum effort (literally a a single "if" check in the code) and embrace having their stuff cracked and hacked. The logic is that this acts as extra marketing and helps converting pirates (lol). There are also people who use packaged solutions like VMprotect and (previously) Armadillo. This tends to nip piracy in a bud, but creates issues with antivirus false positives. It also makes the software heavier and more fragile. There's also a middle ground of custom protection schemes that, if deployed wisely, can create 100x more headaches to crackers vs the effort spent on coding them in. Not that hard to do, but these aren't drop-ins, obviously. Also, closely related, is the question of how the licensing works. Previously, most of the shareware used completely offline licensing using "keys" that were either hardcoded into the program or verified algorithmically (read, with elaborate checksums and such). This caused an emergence of keygens and it also fed credit card fraud with people smash-n-grabbing keys in bulk and then published them for the street cred. Surprisingly, a lot of shareware still uses this method and they still bitch and moan about the consequences. The alternative, obviously, is to use online activation. That is, what is sold is an activation token that can be swapped for a machine-specific license, via an exchange with the licensing server. This nearly completely eliminates the CC fraud and it allows for finer control over licensing. There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend).
- hermitcrab 5y ago
  Handling taxes (VAT, sales tax) when you are selling worldwide is a nightmare. That is why many vendors pay the extra to use 'full fat' payment processors, rather than Stripe.
semireg 5y ago
As an electron developer I used NodeJS to implement a custom licensing system on top of JWT. My app "registers" a computer (fingerprint) with the server. The server can grant licenses where it signs a JWT with a secret key, and the client can verify using the public key. The client will enable features based on the JWT payload. Again... it's crackable, but it's serviceable and I make my software affordable through either a one-time license ($147) or a monthly subscription ($14.99/month). I try my best to make it "worth it" to purchase the app. Label LIVE is a super- boring business label printer app so it takes a "special" person to 1) need the app and then 2) decide that they'd save more money by cracking it than just paying for it. If I 10x my pricing (as my competition does), then I would fully expect users would find it worthwhile to crack and distribute.
grujicd 5y ago
There are payment services which were originally made for desktop apps, with built in support for license files, downloads after payment, etc. I'm using MyCommerce (ex ShareIt), but also had good experience with Avangate - which was later purchased by 2checkout, and now renamed to Verifone.
Melatonic 5y ago
Shareware (at least back in the day) almost always had a free component. For a game that might mean levels 1-3 are free and then you buy the full game for the whole thing.
RantyDave 5y ago
Probably not the answer you're looking for, but the Mac AppStore is the only thing at ever truly worked for me.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Thats nice to hear, seems like a big market to me and under serviced, I'm just about to release an app on there so fingers crossed.
netr0ute 5y ago
Why not eliminate that and just make it FOSS?

tkgally 5y ago

There are a lot of shareware or shareware-like desktop Mac apps that I have been relying on for many years. The programs continue to be updated regularly and don’t seem to be hobby projects, so I assume the developers are supporting themselves. Some are sold through Apple’s App Store, and some are sold directly by the developer. Here are the ones that I use most and the companies that develop them: Fission; Audio Hijack (Rogue Amoeba): https://www.rogueamoeba.com https://www.rogueamoeba.com Amadeus Pro (HairerSoft): https://www.hairersoft.com/index.html https://www.hairersoft.com/index.html Transmit (Panic): https://panic.com https://panic.com Jedit Ω (Artman 21): http://www.artman21.com/en/ http://www.artman21.com/en/ BBEdit (Bare Bones): https://www.barebones.com https://www.barebones.com GraphicConverter (Lemke Software): https://www.lemkesoft.de/ https://www.lemkesoft.de/

ziml77 5y ago
MacOS seems to be a good place to be if you're making paid desktop software. There's a lot of Windows utilities that are freeware and of course Linux is loaded with FOSS. I only run macOS on my laptop and yet it's where I've spent the most money on various utilities. MacOS-only software I've paid for: Bartender, BetterTouchTool, Forklift, SoundSource, Pixelmator Pro, iStat Menus, Nova, Alfred, DaisyDisk, and some other things I'm sure I'm forgetting.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  The state of affairs is that Mac users are more willing to pay for software than Windows users, but not by a factor of 10, which is the Windows/Mac desktop market share ratio.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    This wikipedia page shows that it's a bit under a factor of 5 difference between the two (based on StatCounter data): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... But as you can see later on in the entry, StackOverflow's survey shows the numbers as being much closer. So your target audience matters. I'd expect that software developers aren't the only set of users where the ratio is far off of the average.