In the past few days we have see a flurry of stories about Mac shareware pricing, promotions and giveaways.
The always enjoyable John Gruber from Daring Fireball posted "Pinprick":
Unreasonably priced bundles — or the outright giveaways that MacZot has promoted — are just a way for hard-working Mac developers to get ripped off. Users might like free and super-cheap prices, and MacZot honcho Brian Ball might like the money from his cut (or even in the case of the outright free giveaways, the attention given to MacZot), but there’s a reason why MacZot has pretty much dried up.
Rory Prior from ThinkMac Software also explained why you shouldn't give away your shareware for free.
It is hard to argue with the experts, but I feel that there is a lot of generalization happening here. What is good for one shareware product may not be good for another. If you have created a shareware application that is useful to 99.9% of Mac users (i.e. over 20,000,000 potential users), can you "afford" to "give away" 1,000 copies?
I have to say that placing 1Passwd in MacZot was one of the best decisions we made this year. Not only did we have a day of record sales during the ZOT, our average daily sales more than doubled right after the event and continued to grow ever since. The success of MacZOT is what convinced us that being part of the Heist was a no-brainer.
Case in point: have you heard of NewsMacPro? I stumbled upon it when I was looking for a new shiny newsreader to replace old copy of NetNewsWire. NewsMacPro is a really good application written by ThinkMac Software but I bet that most Mac users have never heard about it. Developing a great product takes a lot of effort but promoting a great product is just as hard and maybe more important.
The most often argument against the MacZOT is the customer support. This is not a surprise, given that most of the companies view this as a liability, a cost that they have to minimize. As Rory puts it in his post:
The app might have cost them nothing to download, but it will cost you every time they get in touch with you because they've lost their serial or they can't figure something out.
I see things differently: asking for support is not what your users want to do, it is a liability for them. It takes time for them to go to your forum or send you an email. For every single question asked, there are at least 10 or more other potential customers who didn't bother to ask and just left. Providing customer support takes a lot of time but it is the only opportunity we have to talk to our users. Heck, we even provided support to the "customer" who we knew used a pirated copy of our software at the time.
Obviously, if you get the same support request 10 times in a row then there is something wrong the software, the website or the documentation. It is our responsibility to improve the product and not force the users to put up with our liability.
The best thing about being a part of MacZOT and MacHeist is that it allowed us to get the ideas and the feedback we would never get otherwise.
If software development is more like gardening than engineering then software products are more like trees rather than cars. If your product is as good as you think it is and if you really believe every single Mac user can benefit from it, then giving away a few thousand copies is a drop in the bucket. If you do not plan to continue improving your product and you view customer support as a chore rather than an investment then likely the ZOTs and Heists are not for you.
Hats off to Brian Ball, John Casasanta and Phill Ryu for coming up with such amazingly creative ideas. If it weren't for these friends, Dave and I would still be "hammering out" J2EE code for "the enterprise".
UPDATE #1 (Nov 22nd, 2006): There were many of comments on MacHeist forum on this subject. The following post by dennykrane nicely sums up the discussion:
i can probably write a long winded response to this debate, but in the end.... because of maczot, mac heist and mydreamapp; i now purchase software. Previously i would crack or find cracks for anything i used. Now i dont. i have bought stuff that i dont even use that often. I just liked the app and the developers work, i thought the app had lots of potential for future versions and i bought it to contribute now and hope it pays of later.
UPDATE #2 (Nov 22nd, 2006): There is another great comment on Digg, posted by CrankyMcGuy:
... I've been wondering about this latest surge in Mac shareware notoriety. I love the deals on MacZot, and think it benefits the developer because that was a sale he didn't have before, but I wondered what the developers thought of it. Obviously, Gruber doesn't think highly of it, especially the give aways, but thanks to MacHeist & MyDreamApp I have a bunch of software I never knew about before. And when the developers release the next version I am more than likely to be a happily upgrading customer. Same with software purchased via MacZot.
I've never seen the Mac Shareware community so energized before. It's very exciting, to be honest.
