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Comment by spigoon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they went with a "paid beta" vs. a traditional free beta.

This is by far the most common question we get asked, and this weekend I'm going to write a full length blog post about that decision. What might shock you even more is that we originally charged to pre-order the alpha version.

The short version:

- We needed to quickly figure out if we were building a product that people loved and thought was worth paying for.

- We're trying to build a product a small number of people love instead of one a large number of people like.[1] If someone loves a product, we've found that they'll pay for it.

- The support issues from growing too quickly would overwhelm us.

The long version involves us offering a traditional free paid beta for our first product: http://codeconnect.io and the lessons we learned from that experience.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

These are fair points and I can definitely see where you are coming from.

If a free beta is out of the question, maybe a time and/or (severly) feature limited trial version could be possible. You are addressing this on you page however there seems to be no obvious reason why this is not possible at this time.

I'm intrigued by the idea and concept of this tool in it's current state and I am definitively looking forward to other languages being supported, however at this time my budget does not allow spending 100$ just because of a very pretty product page.

Please don't take this as an attack against what your are building! Judging from personal experience it's really hard to estimate the value of a new tool without the chance to test how well it integrates in your existing workflow and setup or many experience reports of other developers.

In the meantime I wish you all the luck and success for this very interesting product.

Edit: Did you write about your former experiences with giving out free versions of your software?

re: "We needed to quickly figure out if we were building a product that people loved and thought was worth paying for."

http://i.imgur.com/F6lz4WA.jpg

(purchased)

I can see your point, but I would never pay for a product like this without a free demo version.

These Visual Studio extensions often have the side effect of taking up way too much of the computers resources. Without having a fully functioning (time limited?) version of the product on my machine, working with a large VS solution, I will just move on and probably have forgotten about this by tomorrow...

With a free version available, I would have tested it and if it works as well as in the video, I'd most likely pay for it and recommend it to colleagues by the end of the day.

"We needed to quickly figure out if we were building a product that people loved and thought was worth paying for." - how are people supposed to know if they love it and think it's worth paying for without paying for it in the first place?

What about a free trial period? Something that expires after a few short months.

We used that to try out ReSharper and ended up loving it to the point we bought a few dozen licenses. Management is much easier to convince once you get half the developers wanting the same thing :)

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