Shareware as a business model is alive and well. It's likely that most commercial software a user uses these days started as a demo they were testing, maybe wit

Shareware as a business model is alive and well. It's likely that most commercial software a user uses these days started as a demo they were testing, maybe with a few features missing, or nag screens or a timer -- then they upgraded it to a full licensed copy. For whatever reason, we stopped calling it shareware, but that's basically the model in use for closed-source commercial consumer-level software. In many ways, shareware has become the "default" method for distributing commercial software, and it's non-shareware software that's kind of weird. This even happens on the high end. I worked for a desktop software company years ago, and we gave away our software on a 30-day trial, if they liked it, a seat cost $30k. It was called the "30-till-30" model by our sales guys who didn't realize it was just shareware. Looking at my own list of software I have installed right now: Chrome - free with open source version Firefox - open source + donationware Thunderbird - open source + donationware MS-Office - shareware Foobar - open source + donationware yed - free, but with commercial tools as part of the ecosystem, this makes it in my mind pseudo-shareware Gimp - open source + donationware Simcity 4 - fully commercial Notepad++ - open source + donationware Sublime Text 2 - shareware FileZilla - open source + donationware Mirc - shareware Anki - similar model to yed, desktop version is free, mobile is paid Bulk Rename Utility - donationware, closed source Caustic - similar model to yed, desktop version if free, mobile is paid Pycharm - shareware renoise - shareware bunch of steamgames - most started as a demo, so I'll go with shareware skipping over python, perl and the usual open source suspects and on my phone: most started as a "lite" version so many of the apps are all shareware