Just for some statistics, I just purchased it but the main selling point for me is cross platform. I use Windows/Linux at home and Mac at work, so a tool that works on all of them is a real boon to me. This way I can customize and use a single tool and use it no matter where I am. Same reason I purchased a copy of Sublime Text.

Is it electron based?

If you mean fman then no: I thought about this long and hard but startup speed is crucial and Electron just doesn't cut it. It's based on PyQt. I wrote a blog post about this: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...

I see the Windows version is a 1MB download and the Mac & Linux are 21MB, so I was surprised to ready Python and Qt are involved. I take it the Windows setup is a downloader?

Yes - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778676

Just FYI, Go has a (currently experimental, linux-only) plugin mechanism now. Of course, it's not cross-platform… yet.

Good to hear that... It would have been even better if it was C++ Qt based.

Congratulations! You exemplify the term "pathological customer"!

Is this a new name for someone who wants to avoid a bloatware?

I can understand why people don't like Electron, but what's wrong with Python?

> I'm nearly sold out

Can I ask what your sales goals/expectations are? Being "sold out" on software licenses certainly looks like a marketing trick rather than a meaningful demand quantifier.

> 24% of my visitors are on Mac, Windows is 34% - hardly 1/10

The 1/10 is the actual rate of Mac to Windows desktop shares. The fact that you are getting 24/34 simply means that you are either not reaching Windows audience or the product doesn't resonate with it.

Re "sold out": I explained this in other comments [1], [2].

I believe more and more people are using Macs, especially among my (narrowest) target audience (programmers). That's why I'm seeing ratios different from the average.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777696

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778808

How are you "sold out" of a digital license?

Sounds like a very Nintendo-esque intential shortage to drive demand. Not saying its true, but it was my first thought, as well as 5 of the people in the slack room i shared the link in... all of which went from "ok, lets give this guy money" to "... nah... this doesnt feel right, now..."

It's a good question - I already explained this here in a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777696

You really haven't answered it, though. It's very nonsensical. If you want to see "who's in" and develop for your paying customers, then should you not let people become paying customers so you can develop for them?

Your logic seems to work if you were not allowing trials, but only paying... THEN you would have only paying customers... its your gig, but I think its been a while since i've seen something this strange in software... and its telling that you're having to post the link to your answer so often in these comments. It simply makes no sense, and seems to be serving to drive people away or make them doubt your intentions.

Sorry you find it so disturbing. Especially since you said in another comment that being able to pay for a piece of software makes it appealing to you. I think that's cool because I'm not a big fan of freeloaders.

I didn't think fman would be so successful here. I believed that if I had told people "buy this whenever you feel like it", then they simply wouldn't have bought. At least that would be what I would do.

Another reason is that I want to provide paying users with great support, want to ask "so what would you like implemented" etc., and I don't have the resources to do that for too many people.

I hope it makes more sense now... :/

I just think, unfortunately for you and the project... you took a good boost of traffic by getting a near-top HN story and just let it die. You probably won't get a gift like this again...

Speaking for myself, I won't be using the software. I would have paid for it, as I want a GUI side-by-side, but i couldn't. A nag screen I can't even pay to get rid of is all but insulting, so I won't be loading the software, so the whole "out of sight, out of mind" thing is going to take over, and I probably will never open it again...

Now, seeing your decisions, and I want to stress that I'm not judging you for making them, its your baby, you do what you want with it, and I don't presume to tell you what you should do - just trying to share a perspective that may not be singular... but those decisions make me question the path the software is going to take, because they fly in the face of what I would consider to be reason.

Sad to see you go, but I appreciate the feedback. Thanks for taking the time to share.

he's using artificial scarcity to build hype and pretending otherwise, hence the nearly incoherent answer