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Surfulater 3 - huge price hike (166%) + where is the Firefox add-on?

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J-Mac:
I had decided to take a good look at it but declined when I saw the price. As I mentioned above, I purchased Ultra Recall just a few months ago and yesterday I was just browsing on their forum to see if any informative posts had been made - it is not an easy app to pick up; not real intuitive, but powerful. I found out that they had made an announcement that they had decided to stop all further development of Ultra Recall. The developer posted that message in place of their "Roadmap".

After a bit of an outcry from their users they replaced that announcement with a much-scaled down version of their roadmap, but most seem to believe that was done so they could continue selling Ultra Recall and not suffer anymore revenue-wise.

I mention that because Ultra Recall is also a fairly expensive software application - The price of the Pro version I purchased is $99. That's not to say that Surfulater is planning the same kind of abandonment, but it certainly makes me extremely gun shy about purchasing expensive software from small developers. There are no guarantees at all!

Jim

tomos:
it certainly makes me extremely gun shy about purchasing expensive software from small developers. There are no guarantees at all!
-J-Mac (November 14, 2008, 12:22 PM)
--- End quote ---

true, I worry about that at times, unfortunately there's no guarantees from big companies either ...

EDIT/ apart from (maybe) the guarantee of bloat and (probably) the guarantee of slow or no response to your queries and/or bug reports  :( ;D

Cloq:
@Carol Haynes - I hear you on that mega price hike. I won't be upgrading either.

I am currently looking at Metaproducts Inquiry basic/pro.

Darwin:
it certainly makes me extremely gun shy about purchasing expensive software from small developers. There are no guarantees at all!
-J-Mac (November 14, 2008, 12:22 PM)
--- End quote ---

true, I worry about that at times, unfortunately there's no guarantees from big companies either ...

EDIT/ apart from (maybe) the guarantee of bloat and (probably) the guarantee of slow or no response to your queries and/or bug reports  :( ;D
-tomos (November 14, 2008, 01:48 PM)
--- End quote ---

Witness the GemX debacle...

nevf:
Surfulater Version 1 was released in Dec 2004. All new upgrades and major new releases have been free and gratis until now. That is nearly 4 years of free upgrades with many major new features and capabilities added along the way. Something you don't see too often in the software industry. I take great personal offense at people saying they purchased buggy beta software. Every one has been able to upgrade all the way up to V2.52.10.0 at absolutely no charge. All of you who use Surfulater regularly and spend any time on our forums know that I provide support second to none, and have done so for the past 20+ years of my software development career.

Surfulater started off priced way too low at $35 with a 25% early bird discount on top of that, not to mention Donation Coder and other specials. Unless you have a mass market product it is difficult to build a long term sustainable business at such low prices. The time spent on one support request instantly removes any profit. So we raised the price to $59 a while back and reduced the early bird discount amount. With Version 3 we have added more important new functionality with lots more to come in the 3.x series. We have increased the price again, to $79 which we feel is reasonable and necessary. There is a $10 discount which makes this only $69 for new customers. And for the first time in four years we have charged for an upgrade. We possibly should have extended the paid upgrade period beyond two years and we will reconsider that.

Software and software companies come and go - fact of life. If you can't build and sustain a commercially viable business you won't survive. Some consumers seem to have little interest in this, just wanting the cheapest price or better still free. I predict the rate that software products will cease development and disappear from the market will just keep increasing. Development costs, cost of living, office rental etc. keep going up and the amount some consumers seem to want to spend goes down. And of course we have all the free software to muddy the water. So you do the math. You can come to forums like this and complain, but at the end of the day if you want to see products survive and thrive, someone has to pay. Simple as that.

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