I’m always seeing people give horrible advice and passing it off as sage wisdom. This time, I’m going to pick on Unsanity. Slava advises fellow developers to not offer lifetime free upgrades.

Thanks but no thanks for the advice.

Lifetime free upgrades may be bad for his business model but Unsanity’s business model is not the business model for every shareware developer. Personally, I’m not doing shareware as a full-time job and have absolutely no intention of doing so. I simply write applications that I find useful and then release them to the public. I charge for a few of the more time consuming applications to offset the cost of development, pay for hosting, and purchase the occasional pizza. I’m not trying to make a living off shareware, just to pay for the costs the go into developing it.

That said, lifetime free upgrades are great for my customers. I have no intention of charging them again for a future upgrade and I don’t have to. You see, there are plenty more people that can use MacDialer or SiteTagger that aren’t already using it. I need to find them and sell to them, not to the people that have already been kind enough to fund me so far. If I reach a point where I’ve found near saturation of people who can and will use MacDialer and SiteTagger, then charging for an upgrade would make sense, but, honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point of market saturation.

This type of advice goes into the same camp that says not to charge anything less than $30 for shareware. They claim that it isn’t worth the time to develop for less and that people view cheaper software and crappy software. Frankly, I stop and take a long time to even think about paying $30 for software. I also wouldn’t pay $30 for MacDialer or SiteTagger. My software tends to be the type of useful little utilities that meet a specific need. I figure I’d pay about $10 for that software easily so that’s what I ask for.

Now, I want to clarify what I’ve said above very quickly for any haters out there. I am not claiming that Slava is wrong in his advice per se. It makes sense for a lot of business models. It just falls into the same camp and most of the other advice to indy developers — it makes an incorrect assumption that every business model is the same. It’s probably good advice to a bunch of developers but it is bad advice for a developer like me. And to the extent that I refuse to follow such “advice”, such blanket statements may actually be harmful to the reputation of FCS. Some consumers may see that I don’t follow the sage wisdom of most of the advice out there and wonder what’s wrong with me.

Nothing’s wrong, I just do things my way.