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Comment by geromek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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