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For Developers: Do Donations Make a Difference?

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mouser:
my general impression is that pirated software doesn't effect sales significantly.  it could eat up bandwidth but that just means its spreading the word about your program.  like they say in acting, no publicity is bad publicity.  there was a post recently talking about a microsoft guy was admiting that some level of piracy is good for business.  did you notice sales go down when this happen? or was it just bandwidth.

i've toyed with the idea of making a donation mandatory, but not specifying any threshold amount.  even though its not the accepted definition of donationware, that definition of donationware seems to me much more logical (ie when it is mandatory to make a donation, but the amount is unspecified).  i'd be curious to hear how it goes.

ps. veign your url links are little broken.

Veign:
my general impression is that pirated software doesn't effect sales significantly.  it could eat up bandwidth but that just means its spreading the word about your program.  like they say in acting, no publicity is bad publicity.  there was a post recently talking about a microsoft guy was admiting that some level of piracy is good for business.  did you notice sales go down when this happen? or was it just bandwidth.
-mouser (September 05, 2005, 02:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

Sales was steady but the bandwidth costs killed me.  5Gig / day was way more than I could afford per month.  It became not worth it..

I totally agree that warez sites help get the word out about software but in my case the downloads from warez sites far exceeded the downloads of honest users.

i've toyed with the idea of making a donation mandatory, but not specifying any threshold amount.  even though its not the accepted definition of donationware, that definition of donationware seems to me much more logical (ie when it is mandatory to make a donation, but the amount is unspecified).  i'd be curious to hear how it goes.
-mouser (September 05, 2005, 02:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

This is something I am going to try with one of my shareware applications and a new version of a freeware application I have.  See if users will accept this and understand that ANY donation gets them a registration code.

ps. veign your url links are little broken.
-mouser (September 05, 2005, 02:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

Fixed the links - was adding them the same way as another forum type and this forum works slightly different.

zridling:
Maybe you two are onto something. That is, redefining the boundary between freeware and shareware, conflating the two as donationware. Let's say I go to www.veign.com and download a program, say Note-It, and it times out after 10-15 days unless I donate some or any amount.

This discussion demonstrates in real ways how piracy hurts the small developer and in turn, suffocates good software from reaching the market. In the end, users lose. I don't consider it piracy if I download your program and don't use it. Who would? But even if it's freeware (to me), if you use it and do not attempt to pay it forward in some way, be it feedback, a thank you, a monetary donation, registration, or whatever, then you're pirating it.

PS: Really sorry to hear that about Cfont Pro. It's one of the few high-end font management apps around, period.

mouser:
the only problem with the mandatory donation thing is that a large group of users are simply not in a position to make a donation.  it's not so much that they couldn't spare a dollar, but that they don't have a credit card or an easy way to make a donation.  so if you are philosophically inclined to make your software free, this represents a problem.

Veign:
Maybe the definition of donation needs to be redefined. 

Lets say someone tells me about a bug or a feature that I had not thought about.  The value of this far exceeds the monetary value of lets say 10 users registering the product.

Maybe what needs to be done is to create a page where users register and then 'donate' in one of three ways: monetary value, bug report (something not already on a bug list), or feature / idea request.  Actually lets add a forth: review.  A review for me carries alot of weight on some of the download sites to influence a new user to download and try the application

This would allow a user, any user have the capability to register the application with little or no out-of-pocket.  The user gets the application and I, as the developer, receive something of value.

Now there is no execuse for a user to be using a pirated copy..

Thoughts?

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