Ask HN: How would you want (indie) software to be sold?

by curiousmindz on 9/13/2022, 5:40:36 PM with 3 comments
I have been working on an desktop application for the past two years. I expect it to have limited appeal because it targets a niche of power users (I would be happy if I manage to get 10.000 paying users).

What would be the "best" way to sell it? The simplest for me would be to make it a monthly subscription, but I dislike them, especially for my scenario.

Here are my considerations that I struggle to reconcile:

    - WANT: Ideally, users should be able to try the app before buying it.
    - MUST: Once you purchase it, it is yours forever.
    - WANT/MUST: I plan on continuing to improve this app for the years to come. How do I do that sustainably?
By the way, I am thinking of using the Mac App Store and Windows Store to distribute it so I don't have to deal with licensing, anti-piracy, etc. However, they might not be flexible enough to enable all these scenarios. So, I'm open to alternatives.

  • by curiousmindz on 9/13/2022, 5:41:39 PM

    One idea that I have is to sell every major version (would be cool if I could give a discount to users of previous versions). Then, I could plan about 1 major version per year, while continuing to give bug fixes to the previous version for 2 more years (a core feature of the app is to connect to 3rd parties APIs online so previous versions will break without updates).

    I would also want to give early access to the next major version, so the users don't wait up to a year to try some of the new features. My idea is to start selling the next version as soon as the previous one leaves early access.