The problem I have is that I can justify my time late at night to do development on my applications but that will only take things so far.
There are some advanced components that I had wanted to purchase for future releases that were not available as freeware or the freeware versions were not stable enough. This is where I have a hard time justifying the cost.
Some users just don't understand the massive amount of time to create a solid application. A small donation of $.50 per user would make a huge difference.
Wanna hear what almost made me give up:
I created a pretty solid, well put together font manager called
Cfont Pro. The early versions of the application was freeware but I thought this release was good enough to go shareware. I released the application as shareware and started getting good feedback, some listings on graphic design websites, and good downloads from shareware websites. Now the application had been out maybe 3 days max and I noticed the traffic on the site getting up around 5 gig of bandwidth per day and increasing. I looked at the URL's and noticed the application had been cracked and the warez sites picked it up and was hammering my website.
I created a blacklist script in ASP that looked where the person was coming from and re-directed to an Anti-piracy webpage. This slowed things down but it still was costing me money in bandwidth. Later what I did is put the primary download from Download.com and other sites that host the file. This has helped tremendously.
Every version that comes out gets cracked fast. I try and stay ahead by doing some things that makes the crack un-usable so most users would not get a working copy from the cracks / key gens.
This is what almost made me throw in the towel and not create applications anymore for the public.
(FYI: I just changed
Seeker to a Donationware application and any size donation gets you a registration key)
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