I have a similar problem and I don’t know how to deal with it either. Sometimes it’s hard enough to get actual customers to pay, if they felt that there was a v

I have a similar problem and I don’t know how to deal with it either. Sometimes it’s hard enough to get actual customers to pay, if they felt that there was a viable free alternative many would take that option. I’ve had to shift focus from small companies to exclusively large companies which have very different needs. I now treat my offering to smaller companies as a loss leader. I no longer invest in new functionality for small companies and when the maintenance becomes too expensive we’ll abandon all work for small companies all together. Part of the shift up is moving from a desktop app to a browser app that few people would have access to the server software and given the complexity no big company is going to risk running pirate copies. Plus there is an immense legal risk to them if we find out. Having grown sufficiently large the loss of the smaller companies wouldn’t affect bottom line and would substantially reduce the number of companies interested in pirating. Some of our more advanced features we’ve kept secret and only available to big customers due to the risk of piracy with the small customers. It really does suck and I wish there was better protection available. It may get so bad we’ll have to do what ** ****** does and sue anyone who mentions them online.