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Comment by undergrowth54 | Hacker News Reader

Alongside a donation link, you should put a "purchase a license" or "purchase a subscription" link. That way, an engineer can upload the resulting receipt to expensify and get reimbursed by their employer.

Employers are used to paying for software licenses out of engineering budgets; Donations would generally come out of a different budget managed by someone an engineer doesn't work with day-to-day.

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Another +1 for them adding a price to this. It's a really good program and even as a solo indie developer, I want to give them money so they can afford to keep working on it. Customer support takes time too, I've already emailed them about one bug & used up some minutes of the developer's time.

Preferably not a subscription, though. The whole reason I started using Fork is because their competitor Tower switched to a subscription model, so I started looking for competitors. The Fork developers seem keen on keeping it free, so maybe something like the Sublime Text / REAPER model where it has a nag screen on startup but will keep working anyway (useful for us indie developers until the money rolls in). I also like the idea of no internet-based licensing, so if the company ever disappears I can still use the software.

I think the point is that it should remain a free project but put an artificial "price" instead of a donation link. This is similar to what SQLite does (offering a $1000 license, where you're basically paying for a piece of paper saying "no really, you can use this freely").

Plus the phone number of a developer, with a response 24/7, I think.

Support is actually an entirely different (and much more expensive) concept. Business Hours phone support starts at 8k, but 24/7 phone support costs as much as 85k/year.

https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

I'm also looking for an alternative to Tower. Their subscription model is too expensive.

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