Free Software (or not)
I read an interesting post on the Red Sweater Blog earlier today, titled: It Should Be Free?
It which got me thinking about the price of software and all the factors involved in deciding how much or even if you should charge for a piece of software that you have developed.
Should you charge?
This choice of pricing is always going to be up to the individual developer or their employer but here are some of my thoughts on it:
- Complexity - I would never feel right charging for something that only took a couple hours to put together, the more time you put into something the more it’s worth.
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Competition - If there is no real alternative or competitor to your piece of software then I would definitely charge for it. If you’ve found a gap in the market and there is demand you deserve it.
If there is a lot of competition in the market providing it for free could be very disruptive, even if you only have a half the feature set of the leading competitor.
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Quality over quantity - The core offering is important but just as important is the level of polish and the quality of your software. Have you smoothed off all the sharp corners, got rid of any annoying UI bugs and made it simple, effective and enjoyable to use?
If so customers are going to be much happier to pay for your product than a buggy, painful one, even if it has more features (just look at the iPod)
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How much can you get for it? - At the end of the day, charge what you can for your software. If you think it’s worth £50 and you’ll get enough sales then go for it, if the only people who will use it wouldn’t pay a penny for it then maybe you should make it free and work out another way to make money from it.
Supply and demand are big drivers in any industry, especially software, ignore it at your peril!
Other reasons for free
I often give away a lot of my work for free, or at least I don’t try and monetize them with adverts and the like. I use these free bits of software as learning exercises, to build my portfolio and to help anyone with the same itches that the software I build usually scratches (very geeky itches).
I’ll be releasing Feeddit’s source code under the MIT license in a few weeks for the same reasons, with the added bonus that the collaborative nature of open source software will help evolve it and grow beyond what I can do with it alone.
How do I charge for software?
The only time I charge for software (as in web sites) has been when I’m making something with someone else specifically asked for.
Everything else that I’ve made has either been to scratch my own it, so I give it away for free since I made for myself and it’s done so why not, or has been something I’ve made for a friend.
But if your trade is as a software developer then you have to earn a living somehow, I earn my money by providing a service, using my knowledge and skills to creating software for other people or business on a per hourly basis, or a salary in the case of my day job.
