Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?

Re:Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018? by 8bitsrule on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:08AM (#18466816)

If it's possible for your application, you might consider offering a 'feature-limited' aka 'crippleware' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware) product to help you determine its potential usefullness to a wider audience.

There are a number of approaches to doing that. After getting burned a few times paying $(100s) full-price for products just to find out that a feature I expected/needed was missing, I stopped doing that. I've since found some feature-limited stuff that lets me 'create-but-not-output' that I liked.

If it turns out to be a hit, you can change strategy. If the audience is limited, you can move back to shareware.

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Re:Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018? by clort on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:48AM (#18467674)

I use QCAD occasionally which falls into this category

  https://www.qcad.org/

The author provides downloadable versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the source is available on Github if you want to build it yourself or provide bugfixes or extra features. He provides some features as extensions in a trial mode which ends after 15mins or so or you can disable them. Its pretty neat and to be honest the price for the full version does not seem to be that much though the community edition has always been sufficient for my needs and has enabled me to contribute with bugs/fixes/features.

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