Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenriNext | Hacker News Reader

Again fully agreed, thank you.

What do you think would be reasonable price for perpetual license?

You need to do a market analysis yourself as developer tools are not my area of market expertise. As a general strategy, given this is a new tool you might want to start with just two dimensions/factors: introductory vs. long-term (to drive adoption), and consumer vs. enterprise.

For the purposes of answering your question in the short-term: you might end up with a perpetual license single-developer price knowing that this initial set of customers will be innovators and an "investment" that will be on your books for quite some time. You could even time or quota-limit if you're looking for a specific growth trajectory and initial burst of revenue.

Given that this is perpetual licensing (and again - you need to decide whether this will be for all versions forever, or limited to +K major versions), you need to balance 12-18month runway (cost-feature) planning against any margin you're hoping to generate (maybe none if you're aiming for ramen profitability).

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.

I hope I didn't (again) express my self badly...

Of course I'm not expecting to be spoon-fed with a ready made pricing model, but was just trying to get overall sentiment..

You make a lot of great points, and this is one area where I definitely need help, so thank you for your offer. I'll get in touch after I've survived today :)

Somebody else suggested this already, but I’d probably do something like the following:

$100 - personal license, must be bought by an individual (not company), but can be used for commercial purposes. Best effort only support, pushing folks to use a support forum.

$200/seat - business license version of above, but including email support, just without an SLA.

$400/seat or $15/seat/month - enterprise license, includes priority support.

Based on experience, providing support is the most “expensive” and time consuming portion, so make sure you are pricing high enough to cover that, especially with perpetual licenses.

Keep in mind what this tool replaces. Sure, most obviously, this tool might "be" a debugger, but if by using it you suddenly don't need separate static analysis/reverse-engineering tools in your debugging workflow, then it's in competition with those tools, too. Imagine everything you'd have to buy+install in order to get the same effect as this tool, and then charge more than that (because probably there's at least a few use-cases where, without this exact tool, you just can't do it at all.)

Thanks, really great point. BugJail actually started life as internal tool for dynamic analysis, not for debugging. The longer term vision is merging of dynamic and static analysis, so not exactly, or only, "better debugger".

Have a look at other developer tools like IDEs (IntelliJ) or profilers (YourKit). Look at what kind of value you provide relative to what they do.

You should definitely charge for upgrades. Make the license for a particular version perpetual, but no upgrades after a year unless they pay again.

Most of your money will probably come from large corporate licenses. Think about how to structure them.

Thanks. My current plan is pretty much exactly that: perpetual license for $ X including 1 year of updates, then $ 0.5X for additional year of updates/maintenance.

The main thing I'm uncertain about is the value of X :)

$100

$200 for large companies (revenue over $1MM), $100 for smaller + devs. Maybe $50 for students if you want to spoil them in their youth.

Many legal/finance teams hate licensing costs based on revenue numbers. I’d suggest avoiding that and instead tying something of value to larger companies to the higher priced license, like priority support.

Nobody sells perpetual licenses anymore.

Well, I will :)

I'm doing this mainly to help other developers, so I don't care that much if my monthly recurring revenue or whatever doesn't please Sandhill Road.

Tech that disappears because it isn't profitable enough (or at all) is even worse. A successful business model is in everyone's interest. Don't unilaterally rule anything out, look at it rationally.

Very sensible viewpoint, thank you. Perhaps perpetual licenses and subscriptions could co-exist as alternatives, and customers can choose whichever they prefer.

I considered this overnight. I was naive.

If the goal is to help as many developers as possible, then being profitable and/or well funded makes achieving that goal easier, through hiring more employees and developing better product faster. Which in retrospective sounds obvious.

I'll still keep perpetual license as option, but stop being arrogantly non-commercial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com