Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

62 pointsdoppp31 comments

Asked previously -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027925

I do! I started earning real money after I created the first monitor control app for Apple Silicon (https://lunar.fyi).

I wrote about my journey to doing that here: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

I quit my job in April 2020 and nowadays I make desktop apps on https://lowtechguys.com/

Each app brings about $200/month in revenue at the start, then ramps up as I work on user feedback and telling people about the apps in whichever way I can.

For example rcmd (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) just reached $1.5k/month because it has a more complete feature set than it had in v1 and because more people are recommended it to their peers.

Lunar is great! I use it for the XDR feature, I do wish I could have it automatically toggle on and off when it detects whether it's plugged into the power outlet or on battery.

Thanks! While this feature isn't really in the scope of Lunar, it can be achieved with a more automation generic app like Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/)

I created a simple script here that does just that: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/UigtG5/xdr.lua

And you can install it with the following commands:

    mkdir -p ~/.hammerspoon
    curl https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/UigtG5/xdr.lua >> ~/.hammerspoon/xdr.lua
    echo 'require("xdr")' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua

Awesome! I'll be sure to check this out.

Donyou charge a one time fee or a subscription fee?

I only charge one time purchases for lifetime licenses. Users are happier to pay with this model.

Yep. Been working on Polypane full time since 2019 as a solo developer. Electron based, available on mac, windows and linux, in x64 and arm versions. Its subscription based and I release a new update roughly every month.

It was a side project before that but I started charging for it when I went full time.

https://polypane.app

Very cool product

Can I ask what your marketing/sales strategy is like?

Essentially content marketing, which drives both social sharing and SEO. It helps that I enjoy writing articles! And word-of-mouth of course.

I have tried nearly everything but couldn’t get a lot of things to work (ads are Hard Mode when over half your target audience has an ad blocker!) I’m also trying to do a lot of public speaking, affiliates and ‘engineering as marketing’ (releasing free tools) and they’re okay, but definitely not as effective as content marketing.

Thanks! Is it mainly the blog/SEO or do you do social also? Sorry for so many questions I'm just giving some serious thought to going solo lately and trying to see what's been successful for others.

I share what I write about on social, and share features as I release them or sometimes while I work on them, but I don’t think that counts as ‘doing social’. I do no retargeting or other type of social ads. Just post what I like on twitter and linkedin.

There isn’t a definitive way to do things and a lot is based on your target audience so I doubt much of what you ‘learn’ ends up being applicable. Just have to try and finds something that works that you like!

Nice idea. Definitely "out of the box", in more ways that one.

I'm not making a living yet, but I'm (as indie/solo hacker) building app (electron based) to make a living.

Linkkraft is an offline-first browser that helps you process large amount of tabs when you're trying to extract useful pieces from them.

Problem known as tab clutter/ tab overload.

How does linkkraft help?

1. It saves (locally) history as a graph where your movements interconnected. New movement is new entry. Linkraft visualizes the graph as a tree instead of tabs.

2. Linkkraft creates snapshot of page state for each step (DOM/text/styles/fonts, removes js). That works for usual pages and SPA (like twitter)

There is GC for such snapshots and limitations. So, you don't have to worry about removing not necessary snapshots.

Tree & snapshots complement each other. You don't have to deal with finding html snapshot in your downloads. Snapshots are integrated in the trails tree. When you open snapshot, you will get all context.

Currently, I'm researching for product market fit and for first 10 paying customers. Going to ask $15 per month for that.

(Eventually it will be a tool for hypertext collecting, note-taking, thinking)

https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o... https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o...

With due respect, have you considered a model of paying once, and again perhaps for major upgrades? Or perhaps a gimped free model with paid features?

Paying monthly for local software feels bizarre to me. At least with SaaS I can kinda justify it as 'not my computer.' That said, ongoing development is worth money, but I can't think of anything I use locally that I do or would pay for on a monthly subscription basis.

That said, it may just be because the idea is new to me. In any event, I wish you luck.

Yes, I do consider option: lifetime + 1 year updates

> Paying monthly for local software feels bizarre to me.

I don't like it either but it is actually quite common, Adobe makes a killing doing just that.

Adobe is adobe.

And for the normal adobe person this made high end adobe products suddenly affordable.

PS was 1k while you get it now for 10-30$ / month.

Only two mayor issues with this shit is Lightroom as it got slightly more expensive for seldom users like me and the fact that you can't subscribe to it monthly.

Adobe took the best things from both worlds.

Why not code a Chrome extension ?

1. Chrome store policy (1 feature - 1 extension) 2. Chrome extension sandbox (a lot would still be possible, but hard) 3. Don't want to be trapped in Google platform (you can find a lot of stories of blocked extensions)

But, I'm thinking about making syncing extension that will allow you to open sites from linkkraft in chrome

What type of user will pay $180/year for this?

It might be I'm missing the point but it seems extremely overpriced.

Would you be amazed by the fact that someone pays that for https://roamresearch.com and https://reflect.app https://twitter.com/maccaw/status/1552697245933387776?

Maybe but how are these apps related to yours?

I think it's related by sharing desire to say "... it seems extremely overpriced" (as well as any tool that solves a problem that does not cause you pain)

I don't know. Even without being the target of those apps it seems they do solve something worth +$10 per month.

Sorry I didn't mean to discourage you from your project but from the outside it does seem like it will be hard to sell at that price. I wish you the best.

I made http://monoclesecurity.com a CCTV system for home and business use. I'm hoping to begin working on it full time very soon as I've been building it for the best part of a decade now.

I’m a game developer. Lots of work in that area but it’s hard work with lots of competition. Lots of time spent optimizing performance so you can run on weaker hardware. Insane user experience focus compared to web as well

I know quite a few people that make a living building desktop applications. They aren't doing it solo, but they have some interesting things. I know people working in making Airtraffic Control software, which they do with Java Swing. I know people doing vague defense industry things that they say are desktop applications, and I suspect the Defense industry and government has a lot of this.

I would be far too nervous to even try attempt anything with air traffic controll or medical. I imagine they're crazy interesting to work on and some really cool problems to solve for but commercially as a side gig, the stakes just seem so incredibly high.

I imagine developing anything life-critical requires (by law) following some heavy processes, which would be impossible for a small shop? So probably anything they work on is only in support role and won't kill anyone. That's my guess as an outsider at least.

I am planning to write neural-style-pt frontend with UI, because when I did command line interface for this convolution network a lot of people told me it not so much understandable as core python library. Command-line is for owners but for customers UI is much better to use.

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