Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Deluxe/Pro versions: Good or Bad?

(1/4) > >>

zridling:
I often wonder why some applications offer various versions when they should just offer customers their best product. I'm thinking off the top of my head about Registry apps, some compression apps, tweaking apps. Not saying there should never be a Pro or Lite version of a product, but video apps are notorious for this practice. I say just build one product and let the user decide whether they want the whether to install or turn off certain features.

mouser:
if only the lite version is available for download an evaluation, then its probably a matter of trying to protect themselves against crackers.

sometimes a company will offer two versions of a program and let you download a trial that asks you on each startup if you want to be limited by the lite version features, which is a kind of cool way of letting you see if you can live with the lite version..

zridling:
Never thought of it in that way. Makes sense if you're trying to get folks to get into the program.

Edvard:
One thing that sets Lite-version-ware apart from 30-day-trial-ware: The lite-version style apps at least let you have  some sense of 'ownership'. I downloaded it, installed it, used it and all the features given me are enough to get the given task done, I can save a product of my work and it will always be so until a better product comes down the pipe. With 30-day stuff, man that 29th day is a bummer. Did I figure out all I needed to? Am I going to REALLY need this on the 31st day or am I going to find a better, cheaper app 3 days after I break down and pay the tab? With Lite-version ware at least you ALWAYS have the choice. Some great examples of this: Xplorer2 (a great dual-pane file manager) which maintains 'Lite' and 'Pro' versions, although Nikos has snuck in some Pro version advertising in the new X2Lite; and Tuareg (a music app from before ReBirth ruled the world) which, with version 2, is both products in one. You are offered a choice at startup to continue with the Lite version, 'Try' the Pro version (IIRC that meant you had 10 minutes of full Pro functionality) or purchase a register key before continuing. After that, for your entire session, you are never nagged with popups or greyed out teasers in the pull-down menus, etc. Lite was Lite and you wouldn't know otherwise. There are others I could mention, but these are the best examples I could come up with. From a Developers standpoint, think of it like this: you either have 30 days to impress your customer or the entire life of their use of your product. To sum it up, there's almost no comparison. Lite versions 0wn$0rz!!

zridling:
The NoteTab text editor has a Lite, Standard, and Pro versions, and a pretty good delineation of each one. That's even rarer.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page