I used to work at zynamics (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zynamics) for a long time and while I was not part of the initial team, I still have a good idea of what went on in the early stages.

The company charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for software licenses from day 1 even though the first versions of the products were pretty bad. In fact, we even had customers who bought these early versions not because they wanted us to succeed. I remember at least one customer who bought licenses for many tens of thousands of Euro telling us 'we won't use your software yet because it is not good enough but we believe that you will deliver great software one day and by buying early version we will keep you alive'.

So yeah, charging right from the start worked out tremendously for us. Without it we would not have survived.