Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Pricing decisions

Price per version

Price for product and all updates

Subscription with perpetual license

Subscription

Paid extensions: microtransactions, in-app purchases, DLC (Trainz!)

D1ck move, but somewhat effective: force users to buy tokens in bulk, but don't allow them to spend them all. Like force them to buy minimum of 200 tokens, but your service costs 130 tokens a month. With this pricing, they'd need 19(!) months to get all their money's worth. It's like on concerts/events/food festivals, where catering is available only using their custom currency.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Commercialization

Open Source (various licenses, donations)

Source Available

Free

Free for personal use

Free Demo

Free Trial

Shareware

Paid. More on that next time.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Psychology

Vacuum cleaners are louder, because noise is perceived as power, so quieter are considered less powerful. Also they amplify the noise of debris hitting the tube for better feeling from vacuuming.

Colors mean various stuff:

  • *Black*: Strength, Elegance, High Quality, High Tech.
  • *Blue*: Integrity, Trust, Security, Wisdom, Reliability, Sadness.
  • *Red*: Love, Power, Heat, Speed, Urgency, Fear, Danger.
  • *Green*: Envy, Wealth, Luck, Success.
  • *Orange*: Happiness, Fun, Optimism, Cheapness, Caution.
  • *Pink*: Romance, Youthfulness.
  • *Purple*: Royalty, Magic, Courage, Creativity.
  • *White*: Purity, Lightness.
  • *Yellow*: Joy, Positivity, Jealousy.

https://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/website-colors.html

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Registration process

If you want to personalize user experience and store user's preferences, you need to either store user preferences on-device, which is only temporarily persistent, or you need to store it on the server, for which you need to uniquely identify the user. This is obviously done by user accounts, for which you need a registration, also called “sign-up” process.

You should want to require as few things from the user as possible. That's why many services use e-mail address instead of username and many of them use third other identity providers, mostly social networks, where you're probably already logged in and therefore you only confirm your wish to provide your details to the website.

Very streamlined process without any third party would be: enter your e-mail address and you're immediately logged in as a user. If you want to log in later, click on a link/button in the confirmation e-mail you received as a part of the login process, and you'll be prompted to enter your password and maybe even a username.

You may require the user to confirm his e-mail address before he can start creating content. Until then there's only a sandbox or samples for him to play with.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Limits of the FREE version

It wasn’t easy for me to decide how limited the FREE version should be. Sure, I want users motivate to pay at least something, but I don’t want to oust them completely.

I hate few things in desktop apps, even I understand their purpose. I hate grayed out menu options, just because PRO version has it. I hate even more if the unavailable option isn’t distinguished at all and I learn I have to pay first only after I click on it.

I can live with some promo upon startup or closing the app, because usually I don’t do it too often. But only if it’s in a “polite” way, when I don’t have to hunt the closing window nor close automatically opened tab in my browser.

I like x day trials, when the app works fully, but my problem with trial versions is, that it has to write the start date somewhere, obviously, and this thing stays on my computer even after I got rid of the software, again – obviously, but after that it’s just garbage polluting my system.

I understand DRM solves the problem of crap residing in my computer, but I hate it nevertheless, because it usually means even more crap in my mailbox.

So, what DO I like? I like when the only limitation is I can’t finalize my work (export, render or save), but otherwise I’m freely able to do anything the program offers. After purchase there is an encrypted file with a license key and this way I do it with QetriX apps.

And some polite ads for FREE users, even many of them know how to block them. I believe users can live with tasteful and just slightly disturbing (not by contents) ones.