Develop and Charge Modestly

As a “starving” college student, I know what it’s like to create something awesome and want to charge a lot for it, especially since it would help out a LOT with living expenses; however, in doing so you make whatever you create a bigger target for pirates.

Thoughtful pirates are just pirating it to see if it works for them (mainly because you don’t have a trial version) so if it fits them, they’ll buy it. Other pirates never had the intent to buy it in the first place or one “Freedom Pirate” will buy it and distribute the key as many times as possible before you either disable that key, or whatever. Those, according to Markus “Notch” Persson, were never sales to begin with and it’s better to shrug and say “oh well, maybe they’ll show it to someone who’ll end up actually buying it.” instead of doing everything in your power to make them pay for stealing your software. This is just stupid, in doing so you make yourself look bad and can spark a rallying point for them to get more “Freedom Pirates” to buy en masse and distribute over a secret or “Anonymous” network to hundreds if not hundreds of thousands within minutes where you now lost a lot more sales. If instead you keep cool and give them something they’ll want to pay for, then the pirate will eventually want to pay in order to get that special benefit and make them feel better than others (yes, it’s a pride thing, especially if they’re a really big nerd).

The best way to sell your program, service, etc. is to either make it free and allow for happy customers to donate, which I can say has already proven to be successful, or charge a fair price for your product/service. Don’t charge too low or you’ll be cutting yourself short and reducing the “guilt factor” of future pirates and don’t charge too high or you’ll get more “Freedom Pirates” and end up with fewer sales due to it costing too much for what it provides. This should all be common sense, but from what I’ve been seeing and learning about lately, not many people follow along with this. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my fair share of pirating, but most of those tools are either rarely used, very old, or too expensive for the service they provide. Heck, I paid $15 for an app that does something I could have done from the command line, but I only found out AFTER I bought it. Even worse, it was less efficient than a few lines of code turned into a right-click service that I made in 10 minutes for free. This is called “playing off end user stupidity/gullibility” which I HEAVILY frown upon, and so should you! It’s more important to have a strong customer base than extremely high profit margins, remember that.

Alrighty, I think I’ve said enough in this little rant, but I hope at least someone actually gets something out of this and maybe people can start treating the customer as more than a source of income.

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