stan wrote:thank you all for all your feedback - please keep it coming:)
we realize that some existing users will turn away from us because of the pricing. but on the other hand we think it's a fair price - considering the amount of work and time we invest in it. we're not a big multi-national company, we're just a couple of guys 'wasting' their evenings and weekends with the development of this software:)
we were deciding between two business models:
A have a new release approximately every year and charge for upgrades for each release. most commercial software use this model.
B have a smaller release approximately every month or two months and charge subscription-like fee.
with option A you'd have to wait the whole year to get new features. but on the other hand you'd have permanent license for the last release. so you could keep using all features in e.g. version 5.0 indefinitely even when version 5.1 is released and you didn't upgrade to it.
with option B you get new features more frequently but you have to pay a small fee every year to keep using it.
we think that option B is better since there are so many new ideas and feature requests from you already.
but please do let us know what you think is better pricing model for you and what you are (not) willing to pay for expert lotto. we don't sell expert lotto to make money to pay for our rent or for our kids' meals:) we just need a small extra income to show our wives that the 'wasted' time isn't wasted that much. and we also want to keep our users and customers happy as we benefit from your ideas and suggestions as well.
Stan, Why couldn't Option A & B work together with both receiving updates?, I think 100% of software I have purchased include product updates and this was also the case with EL4 I do know however EL4 was mainly bug fixes though. The people that actually pay for a non expiring license would actually be paying you more money for the product and committing more long term to its use till your next major upgrade, so its not like there trying to get something for nothing.
I do agree you should be rewarded for your efforts, as that's your incentive to keep developing your software, to me using this kind of software is just a different way of picking lottery numbers, and like you I have also got to justify to my wife where I spend money, as you have mention that you justify the time you spend coding EL5, say for some reason money gets short some time down the road, and I can't afford the $19.95 which is actually more than that here in Australia by the time it gets converted plus I also get slugged around $3 for Foreign Currency Conversion fee, and this would be extra cost to me every year, I would end up having a piece of software that is no use to me, but if it never expired I could at least keep using it till I could one day afford the next version if one has been released.
I'm just glad you never had this Licensing model on version 4, I'll just have to get its data updated ready for use again.