Selling Traditional Downloadable Software

There’s a thread about “selling traditional downloadable software” on Hacker News this morning, and I thought some of you might be interested in it.

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Thanks for sharing this. The consensus seems to be that SAAS is the way to do it now, and I concur.

Software is and has never been finished. So why have we been charging for it as if it is?

There are many successful in downloadable desktop software. Affinity is good example, startup that ended with over 3 million sales.

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SAAS only works (unless I am mistaken) with a web-delivered product.
And web apps are not capable of everything.

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Adobe Creative Cloud is very successful SaaS / subscription software.

Don’t forget the FTC is suing Adobe for dark pattern trickery.

I’m a fan of the updates period system that Xojo and a few others use. It’s a fair mixture of “hey developers need to eat” and “I paid for this thing, I get to use it.”

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Software-as-a-Service
it is not good to depending on others …
it have to be absolutely reliable … and it is not 24/7 …
the business processes could interrupt etcetera
it need a fallback option

i not like SAAS because you give data to others.

data = currency

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a example of a SAAS API i used for a solution (time investment of a month in 2024)
the owner decided to consolidate 2 companies and rewrite the api service.
the surprise comes if this all go live in few month.
it is between rework and rewriting software from scratch.

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They transitioned to it by charging less for several years, until they could ensure that they’ve transitioned as many corporate users as possible. It also helped that they acquired their major competitor, Macromedia.

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