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Comment by jpalawaga | Hacker News Reader

That's actually really cool. Kudos to you.

Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don't think it really changes much. I took a quick scan of your website, determined it was expensive screen-dimming software. Others are likely to do the same.

I have no doubt that this took an extraordinary amount of time to get right. You also did a beautiful job with the app and the website. I've tried to put something together that's a fraction of the complexity, and, well--it's just a lot of work. You should be proud of what you built.

That being said, all of what I said still stands: even though it allows you to control the hardware through software, it's still an expensive piece of software, and it's sort of niche. Having to rebuy the software every year for updates is also sort of a piss-off, even though I know you're doing lots of testing for each OS update and possibly hardware revisions too.

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Thanks! Well I guess that's just the current state of selling software. People are reluctant to pay for the work.

Open-source solutions are everywhere, and like someone said recently, open-source is seen as free support unfortunately.

> People are reluctant to pay for the work.

Having seen a few different situations, sometimes people may not pay because:

a) it’s quite expensive in their currency

b) they don’t really have a payment method available for international transactions

c) maybe they’re just poor and got some kind of a hand-me-down computer with their savings

d) culturally, in many places hardware has been seen as worth paying for, but software is seen as something you just copy (don’t even get me started on the pricing differences between app releases that do the same thing but run on Macs and on iOS/iPadOS devices)

e) there is a sense of entitlement towards bits, be they apps or photos or music or movies or TV shows

I completely agree. I am Romanian, and in our country, €20 for software was seen as an impossible amount of money. Nobody would pay that amount for software, even companies I worked at used pirated software.

I sometimes get the “I come from a poor country” email and after checking if the email is not some usual spammer, I provide a 50-75% discount code depending on the country.

I understand that price should be relative to the country, and I have smaller prices on Paddle for the countries that are supported.

f) People feel uncomfortable with the 1 year updates. It's seriously off putting to me, as these days everything turns into a subscription. I understand that you don't want to maintain stuff forever for free, but I really hate that everything seemingly turns into a subscription.

I don't want to pay the full price for some updates in the future. Your app seems like it would sell so much better as an impulse buy pricing wise, but that's just me. If this works for you, it works for you.

I don't mind the price personally but together with the "subscription" feel I won't be buying it, one of the two needs to change for me to be interested.

I'd like to second waffleiron's opinion.

I'd pay twice the yearly cost or more if it was a one-time purchase.

A subscription model is an immediate pass though.

Edit: Dev clarifies elsewhere that the license is perpetual and subsequent payments cover updates. If a nonrecurring payment option exists, then I would happily make use of that, and quite possibly return to pay for updates.

It depends. I think you’ll need more work to find the right customer/market who values what you’ve built and is willing to pay. Potentially it could be a lot more than what your current price is, especially businesses.

>People are reluctant to pay for the work.

This isn't unique to indie-devs. People (and others have) will give you a laundry list of reasons as to why they can't afford to buy your project, but at the same time entitled to use it for free. Even open-source is no pancea; billion dollar corporations have abused open source communities as well.

Threads like these are slotted into the back of my head when people make comments complaining about the SaaS-ification/Cloud-ification/Electron-ification of all software. The calculus is incredibly simple; why take the time building native apps making a third or half as what you are making in Cloud, while others tell you that what you have built isn't that valuable and you should be grateful they even pirated it?

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