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Comment by juanpdelat | Hacker News Reader

I agree. It would be great to see some revenue numbers, if it's really successful (which I think it is), it would be a nice model for other developers or software companies.

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Well, it's infinite trialware, but it pops a few nag screens here and there, especially when saving files. And this, when you are working and have a habit of mashing Cmd+S regularly, gets in the way often enough.

I think the nag dial is just about right between casual use/unlimited evaluation and I'm using this editor for real shit.

I'm not sure about that. Developers tend to be more sensible about paying for software. Regular people will just download it without reading the "yada yada" stuff about paying.

Case in point: WinRAR, anyone?

EDIT: Just to clarify, I like the pricing model too. I just don't think it works for software in general.

An article on the demise of winamp suggested that the winamp people were receiving over $100,000 a month in checks sent by mail. I would suppose if you had an easier way to pay then checks by mail, even more "regular" people would be willing to pay.

I point out winamp because it is similar in that no new features are unlocked after paying.

Fair enough, though few of us will ever write software as popular as WinAMP once was.

I'm fairly sure he's made really quite a large chunk of dollar out of it already. Especially after he started forcing people to pay up if they wanted the very latest builds. That was a stroke of genius.

Really? I was using the dev builds without paying (bought my license yesterday).

Nightly would be the very latest, I think.

That is, it's not like, say, Chrome release where it's Dev -> Beta -> Stable. It is (was?) more like Nightly -> Dev -> Beta/Stable.

I saw it as more that he didn't want the masses trying to use potentially buggy builds as their 9-5 editor, which is what happened with "dev" beforehand.

Interestingly, I think this model works best for 'software for developers'. Developers naturally empathize with the author of their software much more so than a 'typical user' would.

Developers are typically very bad software customers. As much as they could empathize, more often than not, they think they could do it themselves in a couple of weekends.

I have wasted so many months of my life in this trap, spending a few days coding an app myself rather than paying usually less than $100 for it (usually because I want some small feature it doesn't have) . I dont think its ever been worth it in the long run.

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