Title: Hello all!<p>We are selling standalone boring, mainly desktop (although it runs on beefier laptops as well) software. It&#x27;s for Windows and written in boring technologies (C99 for the engine and C# for GUI).
We are considering various business models when it comes to selling it in the future as our current one causes a lot of problems. Some options and thoughts I have about them right now:<p>1)What I call a &quot;classical model&quot; which we tried so far: release 1.0 version, sell it for a fixed price. Continue to support it for a while with bugfixes&#x2F;features. At some point move to developing 2.0 version, sell it again (giving discounts for current 1.0 customers).<p>Advantages: simple, the customers can use software they purchased forever<p>Disadvantages: at some point you need to start collecting features&#x2F;development for the next version. This means you will not be shipping new things for a while and &quot;sit&quot; on developments in house. This creates numerous problems, the most severe are: I)you are releasing all the new things at once making the release period hell as all the bugs&#x2F;suggestions&#x2F;problems hit you at one point in time and II) you can&#x27;t give customers what they want&#x2F;need immediately even if they want to pay for it right now as you need a significant improvements for the next version. III) You don&#x27;t get quick feedback from the customers (only from testers which will always be less complete) about the things you are working on. It may turn out you have spent a few months working on something people don&#x27;t really want or they want it in a different way.<p>2)Pure subscription.<p>Advantages: I)Everyone is on the newest version all the time II)Everyone can cancel&#x2F;renew at any point III)Incentives aligned: developers can ship new stuff immediately, no reason to sit on new developments<p>Disadvantages: you can&#x27;t purchase software and &quot;own it&quot;. I like the idea that software once purchased can be run in 3-5-10 years from now and it&#x27;s not developers&#x27; business when&#x2F;how you choose to run it.<p>3)Some mix of the above. For example one time purchase and then subscription for updates.<p>Potential problems:<p>I)Difficult to determine what happens to people who cancel subscription (do they get the latest version at the time - that&#x27;s difficult to support, what they need to pay if they renew in a few months?)<p>II)What happens when someone want to jump from subscription to one-time payment + updates?<p>III)It&#x27;s seems to be recipe for a situation where there are 100s of &quot;current versions&quot; people are running and that&#x27;s very difficult to support. It would be nice if everyone is on a newest one (or some ancient one that doesn&#x27;t need support anymore).<p>It seems like it&#x27;s very difficult to choose a business model that let people &quot;own&quot; the software but which also keeps incentives for the developers to ship new developments regularly. I guess that can be worked around with frequent release schedule (so you don&#x27;t sit on stuff for too long) but that&#x27;s very difficult to accomplish in a small development team.<p>I also think in case of various subscription&#x2F;subscription hybrid ideas it&#x27;s very important to be very clear about the policy towards people who cancel&#x2F;want to renew after some time.<p>Any advice&#x2F;suggestions are much appreciated!
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