New License Idea for Hobbyists

Lynn Fredricks lfredricks at proactive-intl.com
Tue Jul 21 17:36:00 EDT 2015


>  > How about a $99 per year commercial license for hobbyists 
> who want to  > build free apps (no profit)?  I'll be the 
> first to sign up!!
> 
> How about free, with the option to donate $99 if you choose?

As a customer, I love free stuff. As a vendor, I kind of like it too because
it can be a type of advertising. We do that already at Paradigma with
Valentina Studio. We give away the equivalent of what other guys charge $99
or more. Then a (smaller) group of people come back and buy the Pro version
to get the additional features.

But there's also the support end of it, too. As a vendor, you have to decide
if you can actually support / afford your freemium model. It is really a
complex thing. A major consideration is to what degree does your free level
cannibalizes your sales of higher end versions.

For example, consider $99 for commercial for free applications. You could
have a company buy such a license, and produce all sorts of compiled
applications for internal use, or use by their customers. They are still
generating a profit off of whatever is being supported by the free
applications. They could also use the FOSS community version too, which
would probably be fine for any applications used internally - but they might
be reluctant to distribute those FOSS apps if a competitor can get some
advantage from it.

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server 





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