Curious if any HNers are running successful businesses selling desktop/downloadable software with a one-time payment model - not SaaS, not subscriptions. Something like the old days. How's the market for that? What's your experience with support and updates?
My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on two machines, you had to buy two licenses with two keys.
Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.
Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.
Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.
Legal changes are making it increasingly very difficult to sell perpetual licenses. For example, in Germany, a new law recently took effect that clarifies that if you sell a software license for a given period of time, you're liable to provide whatever updates/support the customer may need over the course of the software's licensing period to enable the customer to keep running it, at no additional cost, regardless of what it costs you. I'm not a lawyer and may be getting this wrong, but if you're contemplating getting into the business of selling perpetual licenses in software, definitely check with a lawyer. It's not like it was in the 90s.
In the 90s, a large driver of recurring revenue for software was that when the OS and hardware landscape changed, you made a new version of the software adapted to that change, and then, if customers wanted to upgrade their OS or hardware (frequently for reasons unrelated to your product), that made them come back to you to pay for the new version of your product. Under the new legal regime, you would be forced to give them the update for free, so if you sell an actual perpetual software license, you have a fixed amount of revenue on one hand, and a potentially unlimited liability to incur additional costs on the other.
I started selling commercial use software licenses on 01 January 2025 for installable/downloadable software I have been developing for about 5 years. The software targets Microsoft Windows.
As the software is of the nature that it will require updates indefinitely (as OS updates come and go), and given the fact that the license is specifically for commercial use, I decided to go with a subscription model instead of a one-time payment model to ensure its long-term sustainability.
I am lucky that this specific software is very "sticky" and already has a die-hard fan base. It also helps that people in the Windows ecosystem are used to paying for commercial use software licenses.
This month to date I have made $800 on license sales. It will be interesting to see how the license sales continue to progress (or don't?) throughout the rest of the year.
I want so much to be in the business of selling my own traditional downloadable software, that I've thought about (in the absence of an idea) just putting together a do-nothing application with payment, installer, configuration dialogs, bug feedback - everything but a raison d'etre.
The irony is in my day job I am developing a traditional downloadable Windows application which will come with an immediate user base. But although I have considerable discretion over the project, it isn't mine (in an intellectual property sense), and I'm not getting rich off it.
lefstathiou ·1 days ago
Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.
Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.
Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.
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stakhanov ·1 days ago
In the 90s, a large driver of recurring revenue for software was that when the OS and hardware landscape changed, you made a new version of the software adapted to that change, and then, if customers wanted to upgrade their OS or hardware (frequently for reasons unrelated to your product), that made them come back to you to pay for the new version of your product. Under the new legal regime, you would be forced to give them the update for free, so if you sell an actual perpetual software license, you have a fixed amount of revenue on one hand, and a potentially unlimited liability to incur additional costs on the other.
Show replies
bsnnkv ·1 days ago
As the software is of the nature that it will require updates indefinitely (as OS updates come and go), and given the fact that the license is specifically for commercial use, I decided to go with a subscription model instead of a one-time payment model to ensure its long-term sustainability.
I am lucky that this specific software is very "sticky" and already has a die-hard fan base. It also helps that people in the Windows ecosystem are used to paying for commercial use software licenses.
This month to date I have made $800 on license sales. It will be interesting to see how the license sales continue to progress (or don't?) throughout the rest of the year.
Show replies
phaedrus ·1 days ago
The irony is in my day job I am developing a traditional downloadable Windows application which will come with an immediate user base. But although I have considerable discretion over the project, it isn't mine (in an intellectual property sense), and I'm not getting rich off it.
paradite ·1 days ago
Many people have told me to switch to subscription but I just don't think it's the "right" thing to do with a desktop GUI app.
https://prompt.16x.engineer/