5 ms·

It’s not screen dimming. It is an app to fully control the monitor without using its physical buttons. Lunar can change the hardware brightness, the same one t

by alin23 5y ago

It’s not screen dimming. It is an app to fully control the monitor without using its physical buttons. Lunar can change the hardware brightness, the same one that you can change using the monitor OSD. That in itself required a lot of reverse engineering and research about the DDC protocol. Adaptive brightness, ambient light sensor integration and other automatic features also needed months of non-stop work. Plus, the app is open source, trying to give something back to the community which gave me the inspiration to create this: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours. I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply. the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it | the thief would have probably never bought it If you don't need the Pro features, don't pay for them and don't use them. Simple as that. Why does it feel okay to steal them in the software world, but it's clearly a crime in the real world?

axg11 5y ago
You're describing the complexity of achieving the outcome. That is a great achievement - you spent months of work to achieve something technically complex. Congratulations, sincerely. However, to the end user, Lunar is a utility that controls screen brightness. I too am not surprised that many people are reluctant to pay a yearly subscription to control the brightness of their display.
- alin23 5y ago
  The screen brightness changing is free forever. The license is unlimited (not yearly subscription) and only for the Pro features (automatic adaptive brightness, sensor integration etc.)
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  It doesn't matter. He created it and can price it at $1,000 if he wants. The point is nobody should expect him to continue working for free after people crack the software. Thus, cracking hurts indie devs and innovation because there's less recoupable reward for such work.
jpalawaga 5y ago
That's actually really cool. Kudos to you. Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don't think it really changes much. I took a quick scan of your website, determined it was expensive screen-dimming software. Others are likely to do the same. I have no doubt that this took an extraordinary amount of time to get right. You also did a beautiful job with the app and the website. I've tried to put something together that's a fraction of the complexity, and, well--it's just a lot of work. You should be proud of what you built. That being said, all of what I said still stands: even though it allows you to control the hardware through software, it's still an expensive piece of software, and it's sort of niche. Having to rebuy the software every year for updates is also sort of a piss-off, even though I know you're doing lots of testing for each OS update and possibly hardware revisions too.
- alin23 5y ago
  Thanks! Well I guess that's just the current state of selling software. People are reluctant to pay for the work. Open-source solutions are everywhere, and like someone said recently, open-source is seen as free support unfortunately.
  - AnonHP 5y ago
    > People are reluctant to pay for the work. Having seen a few different situations, sometimes people may not pay because: a) it’s quite expensive in their currency b) they don’t really have a payment method available for international transactions c) maybe they’re just poor and got some kind of a hand-me-down computer with their savings d) culturally, in many places hardware has been seen as worth paying for, but software is seen as something you just copy (don’t even get me started on the pricing differences between app releases that do the same thing but run on Macs and on iOS/iPadOS devices) e) there is a sense of entitlement towards bits, be they apps or photos or music or movies or TV shows
    - alin23 5y ago
      I completely agree. I am Romanian, and in our country, €20 for software was seen as an impossible amount of money. Nobody would pay that amount for software, even companies I worked at used pirated software. I sometimes get the “I come from a poor country” email and after checking if the email is not some usual spammer, I provide a 50-75% discount code depending on the country. I understand that price should be relative to the country, and I have smaller prices on Paddle for the countries that are supported.
fuckcensorship 5y ago
In the wise words of GabeN: > “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” [1] [1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
- postalrat 5y ago
  Then explain all the steam sales.
  - conductr 5y ago
    I feel like steam sales validate this point. Steam provides a better service than downloading warez and cracked games from p2p sites. For many, it's better than visiting a local retail/GameStop and buying the game. It also unlocks a world of indie games that would otherwise be not so easily discovered/attainable. So, people pay.
    - postalrat 5y ago
      I meant to say all big sales steam has. You know, the ones that brought in like 80% of the users since they were getting such a good deal. “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” - GabeN Seems like a pricing issue as well as a service issue.
      - MAGZine 5y ago
        sure, until you look at the completion% of those games. People are buying things not to play them, but because it's a good deal/easy to do. Many of the games on the sale are acquired and not played.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
AnonHP 5y ago
Not GP. > Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours. I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply. Seeing the odd numbered price of $23, I presume you have tried different pricing tiers and options, since pricing is a matter of elasticity and finding the right price point to maximize your revenue would require some effort. > the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it | the thief would have probably never bought it Actually, that saying about piracy is true many a times. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work in your favor either way. Anecdotally, I decide what I’m willing to pay for something and what I’m not willing to pay for something. Have I pirated software? Yes, I have in the distant past. And during those times, I wouldn’t have bought them at those prices either. Maybe you need to change your website messaging to encourage those who cannot or will not pay to use the Lite version and encourage those who want the Pro version to pay. Pricing doesn’t have to be static all the time. I hope you find the best options that work well for you and your customers.
iso1210 5y ago
> it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it "the thief would have probably never bought it" No it's not. If a thief takes your bike, you no longer have it, you can't sell it.
- alin23 5y ago
  Indeed, the problem in the analogy seems to be that software is infinitely able to duplicate. But what’s overlooked is that software also needs maintenance, lots of it. Tomorrow will be an Apple Event and I’m already expecting some new hardware I’ll have to support or some breaking change to an internal API (because controlling monitors isn’t possible with public APIs). When a bike is bought, the owner is done with it. While the software developer is bound to keep the software running and compatible with new technologies. Of course, I could just forget about it and leave the users that bought it with an unusable app when the next MacBook comes out. If piracy is accepted, why wouldn’t this be accepted too.
  - mnsc 5y ago
    The problem with the analogy is that it doesn't work. Never has and never will. And you started it with comparing piracy to a bike theft. If someone without money came and stole my bike but I still had a copy of my bike. I wouldn't mind.
    - alin23 5y ago
      Ok maybe not a bike. Maybe a jar of strawberry jam filled from a large pot :) You won’t care as much about the theft since you still have an almost full pot of strawberry jam, but you care a little since that pot will eventually end. Analogs in the order of appearance: - jar of jam: copy of Lunar - large pot of jam: my willingness to keep updating the app in a world where everyone sees theft as “meh whatever, I wouldn’t have paid anyway”
      - iso1210 5y ago
        A better analogy would be if I were to give a walking tour to people who pay me $50 to do said tour, but someone uses a parabolic microphone to unknowingly listen in to the tour
vmception 5y ago
The market says this is mispriced. Has nothing to do with the complexity. Per license at the wrong price is the wrong price. If the offline version cant be protected and the legal remedy is inadequate then pick a different line of business and exit the market.
- alin23 5y ago
  The license is unlimited. You can pay the next year only if you need the updates. If the app keeps working as expected and you don’t need any update, the Pro features will be available forever on that license.
  - vmception 5y ago
    The price is wrong and you don’t want to admit that. This is a free utility or $1 for a tiny tiny market. Hook people and then charge them in that kind of shitty update model. Or a different model. Upsell something else in the app. Collect and sell data. If that price and funnel is not worth your time, then you have to do something else, thats it.
    - alin23 5y ago
      wtf edit: Oh I see, you're that guy that comments on everything [0]. Sorry for responding in the first place. [0] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
      - vmception 5y ago
        That’s me! My submissions havent yet hit though, so far. Your $23 license-if-you-want-to-upgrade is arbitrarily priced for what consumers are used to.
        alin23 5y ago
        Not sure if you knew this, but you’re already appearing in Google search predictions: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/jKbRqM/vmception.png https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/jKbRqM/vmception.png
Siira 5y ago
> clearly a crime in the real world? Because real theft destroys value, while “stealing” information merely doesn’t realize potential gains. > I barely make half Entrepreneurship is difficult. If it was merely about effort, our societies would have been completely different. Interesting careers tend to pay less; video game developers work more and get paid less. FOSS software written by unpaid labor is perhaps the extreme example.

by alin23 5y ago

axg11 5y ago

You're describing the complexity of achieving the outcome. That is a great achievement - you spent months of work to achieve something technically complex. Congratulations, sincerely. However, to the end user, Lunar is a utility that controls screen brightness. I too am not surprised that many people are reluctant to pay a yearly subscription to control the brightness of their display.

alin23 5y ago
The screen brightness changing is free forever. The license is unlimited (not yearly subscription) and only for the Pro features (automatic adaptive brightness, sensor integration etc.)
unityByFreedom 5y ago
It doesn't matter. He created it and can price it at $1,000 if he wants. The point is nobody should expect him to continue working for free after people crack the software. Thus, cracking hurts indie devs and innovation because there's less recoupable reward for such work.

jpalawaga 5y ago

That's actually really cool. Kudos to you. Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don't think it really changes much. I took a quick scan of your website, determined it was expensive screen-dimming software. Others are likely to do the same. I have no doubt that this took an extraordinary amount of time to get right. You also did a beautiful job with the app and the website. I've tried to put something together that's a fraction of the complexity, and, well--it's just a lot of work. You should be proud of what you built. That being said, all of what I said still stands: even though it allows you to control the hardware through software, it's still an expensive piece of software, and it's sort of niche. Having to rebuy the software every year for updates is also sort of a piss-off, even though I know you're doing lots of testing for each OS update and possibly hardware revisions too.

alin23 5y ago
Thanks! Well I guess that's just the current state of selling software. People are reluctant to pay for the work. Open-source solutions are everywhere, and like someone said recently, open-source is seen as free support unfortunately.
- AnonHP 5y ago
  > People are reluctant to pay for the work. Having seen a few different situations, sometimes people may not pay because: a) it’s quite expensive in their currency b) they don’t really have a payment method available for international transactions c) maybe they’re just poor and got some kind of a hand-me-down computer with their savings d) culturally, in many places hardware has been seen as worth paying for, but software is seen as something you just copy (don’t even get me started on the pricing differences between app releases that do the same thing but run on Macs and on iOS/iPadOS devices) e) there is a sense of entitlement towards bits, be they apps or photos or music or movies or TV shows
  - alin23 5y ago
    I completely agree. I am Romanian, and in our country, €20 for software was seen as an impossible amount of money. Nobody would pay that amount for software, even companies I worked at used pirated software. I sometimes get the “I come from a poor country” email and after checking if the email is not some usual spammer, I provide a 50-75% discount code depending on the country. I understand that price should be relative to the country, and I have smaller prices on Paddle for the countries that are supported.

fuckcensorship 5y ago

In the wise words of GabeN: > “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” [1] [1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...

postalrat 5y ago
Then explain all the steam sales.
- conductr 5y ago
  I feel like steam sales validate this point. Steam provides a better service than downloading warez and cracked games from p2p sites. For many, it's better than visiting a local retail/GameStop and buying the game. It also unlocks a world of indie games that would otherwise be not so easily discovered/attainable. So, people pay.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    I meant to say all big sales steam has. You know, the ones that brought in like 80% of the users since they were getting such a good deal. “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” - GabeN Seems like a pricing issue as well as a service issue.
    - MAGZine 5y ago
      sure, until you look at the completion% of those games. People are buying things not to play them, but because it's a good deal/easy to do. Many of the games on the sale are acquired and not played.
- shkkmo 5y ago

AnonHP 5y ago

Not GP. > Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours. I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply. Seeing the odd numbered price of $23, I presume you have tried different pricing tiers and options, since pricing is a matter of elasticity and finding the right price point to maximize your revenue would require some effort. > the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it | the thief would have probably never bought it Actually, that saying about piracy is true many a times. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work in your favor either way. Anecdotally, I decide what I’m willing to pay for something and what I’m not willing to pay for something. Have I pirated software? Yes, I have in the distant past. And during those times, I wouldn’t have bought them at those prices either. Maybe you need to change your website messaging to encourage those who cannot or will not pay to use the Lite version and encourage those who want the Pro version to pay. Pricing doesn’t have to be static all the time. I hope you find the best options that work well for you and your customers.

iso1210 5y ago

> it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it "the thief would have probably never bought it" No it's not. If a thief takes your bike, you no longer have it, you can't sell it.

alin23 5y ago
Indeed, the problem in the analogy seems to be that software is infinitely able to duplicate. But what’s overlooked is that software also needs maintenance, lots of it. Tomorrow will be an Apple Event and I’m already expecting some new hardware I’ll have to support or some breaking change to an internal API (because controlling monitors isn’t possible with public APIs). When a bike is bought, the owner is done with it. While the software developer is bound to keep the software running and compatible with new technologies. Of course, I could just forget about it and leave the users that bought it with an unusable app when the next MacBook comes out. If piracy is accepted, why wouldn’t this be accepted too.
- mnsc 5y ago
  The problem with the analogy is that it doesn't work. Never has and never will. And you started it with comparing piracy to a bike theft. If someone without money came and stole my bike but I still had a copy of my bike. I wouldn't mind.
  - alin23 5y ago
    Ok maybe not a bike. Maybe a jar of strawberry jam filled from a large pot :) You won’t care as much about the theft since you still have an almost full pot of strawberry jam, but you care a little since that pot will eventually end. Analogs in the order of appearance: - jar of jam: copy of Lunar - large pot of jam: my willingness to keep updating the app in a world where everyone sees theft as “meh whatever, I wouldn’t have paid anyway”
    - iso1210 5y ago
      A better analogy would be if I were to give a walking tour to people who pay me $50 to do said tour, but someone uses a parabolic microphone to unknowingly listen in to the tour

vmception 5y ago

The market says this is mispriced. Has nothing to do with the complexity. Per license at the wrong price is the wrong price. If the offline version cant be protected and the legal remedy is inadequate then pick a different line of business and exit the market.

alin23 5y ago
The license is unlimited. You can pay the next year only if you need the updates. If the app keeps working as expected and you don’t need any update, the Pro features will be available forever on that license.
- vmception 5y ago
  The price is wrong and you don’t want to admit that. This is a free utility or $1 for a tiny tiny market. Hook people and then charge them in that kind of shitty update model. Or a different model. Upsell something else in the app. Collect and sell data. If that price and funnel is not worth your time, then you have to do something else, thats it.
  - alin23 5y ago
    wtf edit: Oh I see, you're that guy that comments on everything [0]. Sorry for responding in the first place. [0] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
    - vmception 5y ago
      That’s me! My submissions havent yet hit though, so far. Your $23 license-if-you-want-to-upgrade is arbitrarily priced for what consumers are used to.
      - alin23 5y ago
        Not sure if you knew this, but you’re already appearing in Google search predictions: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/jKbRqM/vmception.png https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/jKbRqM/vmception.png

Siira 5y ago

> clearly a crime in the real world? Because real theft destroys value, while “stealing” information merely doesn’t realize potential gains. > I barely make half Entrepreneurship is difficult. If it was merely about effort, our societies would have been completely different. Interesting careers tend to pay less; video game developers work more and get paid less. FOSS software written by unpaid labor is perhaps the extreme example.