Burnt-out and slightly devastated, I called it a loss and tried to move on.īut like I said at the top of this post, my heart is in software and I wasn't getting that type of satisfaction from my day job. And by May 2018, my one-person indie company was essentially bankrupt. I won't bore you with the gory details - because they're both personal and quite boring - but in late 2017 the business came crashing down. But with the birth of my son (and then daughter), my wife left her job to raise them while they were babies and I went back to a 9 to 5 job plus my software business. You'll see that I've had to rely on revenue from existing customers as the number of new users buying my app has fallen.įrom 2012 through 2014 it was my only job. Here's a chart of total new customers gained each month from 2007 through last month. And even with those discounts, my upgrade revenue typically dwarfed my income from new customers more and more with each passing year. Over the course of twelve years I released seven paid upgrades - each time offering existing customers a discount of 15 to 50% off. At that point you could upgrade at a discounted price or stick with your current version as long as it kept working for you. Your one-time payment got you all minor updates until the next major release. VHX followed the typical up-front pricing model. Originally costing $7 for version 1.0, over the next six years it would mature and gain new features until finally settling at $49 in 2013 a price that lasted until November 2019. Other small projects like that followed, but my first, real commercial endeavor (at least as I view it) was VirtualHostX in 2007. It certainly didn't make me rich, but I was able to buy the occasional sandwich on the way to my college job at RadioShack. (Fun story: In 2009 someone bought the domain and turned it into a revenge-porn site.) For a one-time payment of $5, you could upload as many photos to the website as you wanted, and using a specially crafted file format that I reverse engineered, my server would send the photo to your SprintPCS flip-phone for you to use as a wallpaper or caller ID image. The first dollar I ever made from a piece of software I wrote myself was from a website I built in 2002 called. So, here's my unsolicited thoughts on the state of software subscriptions both as a business owner and as a customer. I love the high I get from solving a difficult problem in my own apps and seeing the even more amazing accomplishments other developers pull off.Īnd when I see a well-crafted, beloved indie app (or entire company!) go under, it kills me. It's the thing in life I'm most passionate about (other than my family, which I guess I'm required to say). I've been programming in some form or another for twenty-seven years. I work for a company that primarily builds hardware, but software is my true love. Ryan Christoffel wrote about The Iconfactory announcing that their amazing app Linea Sketch will be doing the same in 2020.Last week I moved my oldest and best selling Mac app to a subscription model.
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