We Are Closing Down the CppCat Project | Hacker News Reader

We Are Closing Down the CppCat Project

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55 pointsfranzb16 comments

What they thought wrong about the student licenses is that students typically don't spread a word, but instead get used to the software and will (if they like it) ask their employer in the future to buy licenses for the company, so that they can still use it at work.

The cycle from student to employee takes a few years - so you would expect gains from giving licenses away for free to students earliest a few years from this offer.

I can't imagine starting such an effort, in this field, while giving it only one year to make money at net; just about breaking even is amazing and shows there's serious demand. They really shouldn't have bothered in the first place, especially since they've created hard feelings and distrust from the users they're abandoning so quickly (assuming they weren't up front about this).

Interesting perspective for anyone considering moving down market. Note that they almost broke even, but that wasn't profitable enough compared to their other business:

    During its short lifetime, this project has brought us almost as much money as we had put into its development, promotion, and maintenance.

In other situations, almost breaking even after only a year with a new product would be considered a huge win, but I understand they had considerable opportunity cost.

I also find it interesting, that as far as I can tell, the only pricing info on their main product is that it is more expensive than $500 (the high point to which they were advised to drop the price for CPPCAT).

I suppose it's fine to only cater to a high market from a business perspective, but I'd much rather just have them list the price at some high-point they usually charge (eg: 3000$/developer/year ?) with an added caveat of "contact us to negotiate a better price".

Why would I spend hours evaluating a tool I have no idea what costs? I also really can't stand the pricing model of pay-as-much-as-you-can -- then again, I don't use Oracle either.

Not that it really matters -- currently I'm not their target demographic anyway.

I just started using CPPCAT for a small safety critical embedded project. I'm a "indie" developer so even at $250 a year it was the most expensive software I use. [I use Visual Studio but that costs less per year.]

I can't blame them for leaving the low cost market. Customers with small budgets often (usually?) have a lower ROI than customers with large budgets.

tldr: Products that solve enterprise problems can't always be scaled down, because the low end of the market might not have the problem in the first place.

In my mind, PVS Studio is the perfect product for a freemium model. I don't know enough about it to say what functionality should be put behind a paywall (maybe a limit on the number of lines of code it can analyze?) but it seems one of those things where you can create demand at the high end of the market by giving the product away at the low end. If people learn to use it on their hobbies, they'll ask to be able to use it at work too.

It's really hard to sell programming tools today. Everyone now expect them to be free.

The static analysis business is really hard from the monetization perspective.

Isn't monetization hard for most tools aimed at developers (rather than at companies with teams of developers)?

I think that books and book packages that solve a certain problem for a reasonable price point (<$100) are the only developer tools that get bought by small developers--see Nathan Barry, etc: http://nathanbarry.com/

It is really interesting. You pointed that the static analysis tools are aimed at developers but even the guys from PVS-Studio admit their main customers are big companies with teams of developers and I agree. From my experience such companies "force" their developers to use these kind of tools. It is somehow paradoxical that such tools are so technical only developers understand their results but only managers want (or think they want) to consume them.

Pretty much any large open-source project uses Clang's Static Analyzer. So there is a demand for such tools

Maybe you meant "there is a demand for such tools as long as they are free"...

Hmmm? I'm not sure what you mean by "books and book packages", but as a small developer I've certainly bought development tools priced under $100. That's a sort of dividing line for me, though -- I don't think I've ever purchased development software priced over $100 unless I absolutely had to.

And yeah, Windows-only static analysis software priced at $250 would be a very hard sell for me...

One of the founders? advisors? has a pretty heartbreaking (& funny) talk at Stanford about this.

I've tried it and it really has some nice catches that other tools miss. Now their PVS Studio still remains.

Damn!

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