[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop appl...
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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
I did ask the same question in 2016 [1] and got some really
interesting answers. I'm still chasing the dream of having a side-
business and earning some side money, but with web apps it means
mostly SaaS. Personally I hate rent-seeking behaviors (I'm not
alone, it seems - "Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over
Subscription Software" [2]), so I'm trying to know what people are
doing regarding desktop apps. Are people still building desktop
apps? More specifically, can you make a living (or earn some side
money) in 2022 by selling a desktop app? Please share it with us,
or are we doomed to build web apps and SaaS for the foreseeable
future? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658873 [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30021404
Author : jventura
Score : 175 points
Date : 2022-01-21 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
| everly wrote:
| Webgility is an example of a SaaS company that offers a desktop
| or cloud-based version of their product.
|
| Quickbooks for that matter as well.
| FpUser wrote:
| I/my company have active Windows desktop application as a product
| with about 50,000 clients. Not making me rich but in combination
| with the products I develop for clients I am doing ok.
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I make video games like this one [0] or this one [1]. It's pretty
| simple, you can buy the game and then download and play it. Are
| games 'desktop apps'? It's not the language I would normally use
| but I think it applies.
|
| Having been out of the web app development bubble for about seven
| years now, there's whole industries that work entirely in the
| pay-for-it-and-then-download model, and while games-as-a-service
| is more popular now than ever before there's still plenty of the
| old-school way of doing things going on.
|
| I really like the simplicity. You can buy the thing, maybe from
| Steam or maybe from a DRM-free store like Humble, download it,
| play it. You can get a refund if you don't like it, or buy
| another copy and gift it to a friend if you do.
|
| [0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/
|
| [1] -
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...
| colbyhub wrote:
| I've been wanting to enter the game space for some time now. Is
| this what you do full-time? If so, how did you transition from
| web dev to game dev?
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I got up early every day and got in an hour or two before my
| proper full-time backend Python programming job begun. That
| and working on The Cat Machine on Saturdays got it finished
| within a year, and then after it came out I could go full-
| time. It's hard to just make the switch from 'real' (normal?)
| job to small business game programming without already having
| a game that's done okay released, so that's what worked for
| me.
| thom wrote:
| How have you found the switch technically? What frameworks
| are you using?
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I still use a lot of Python, often for little tools or
| scripts, especially anything where data needs to be
| transformed (like file formats for art assets), or
| something needs to be automated (run build scripts for
| all the different platforms). I built a little graphical
| puzzle/level editor for The Cat Machine with Python and
| SDL bindings too.
|
| But I'm mostly using C# and Unity these days. There's too
| much useful stuff build into Unity to ignore it, and C#
| is very pleasant so I didn't find it particularly hard to
| make the jump - there's just a very definite 'Way' Unity
| wants you to do everything and so most of the time it's
| just a case of working out what that Way is.
| thom wrote:
| Oh wow, hope this is sustainable for you, Eldritch Zookeeper
| looks wonderful and has been in my wishlist since it popped up
| in my queue!
| optymizer wrote:
| Congrats on releasing games on Steam! I'd like at some point
| quit my job and run a small game studio. I have so many
| questions, mostly out of curiosity. If you could answer the
| ones you're comfortable with, I'd appreciate it:
|
| * What's your tech stack for the games? Are you using an
| engine?
|
| * Who made the art? If you did it yourself, what software are
| you using?
|
| * How was the process for releasing your game on Steam? Did you
| have to do a lot of marketing to get users to greenlight your
| project?
|
| * How did you make the trailer for the Eldritch Zookeeper? If
| you didn't do the voice, how did you hire the voice person?
|
| * The Cat Machine has 107 reviews on Steam. How many users does
| that translate to?
|
| * Does your current employer have a clause in the contract
| discussing IP made on your own time? Did you have to get an
| exception from your current employer to be able to release
| games on Steam?
|
| Thanks in advance.
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| Mostly Unity and C#, I still use Python for bits and pieces
| (see my other comment). I made and make all the art myself,
| just painting in Photoshop, animating in the wonderful Spine
| by Esoteric Software (great tool that's worth every penny),
| and do all my video and audio editing in DaVinci Resolve (I
| used to use Adobe AfterEffects but the monthly fee was just
| too high for me). I also use Blender for any 3D work (I used
| to use Modo, but again, the monthly fee was too high).
|
| Marketing for The Cat Machine wasn't too bad, I had an okay
| ground game with getting coverage from gaming websites and
| someone posts it on Reddit and for 2015 that was good-enough
| marketing for the time, more than enough to Greenlight the
| game. The voice actor is Scott Gilmour (@scottgilmour7 on
| Twitter) and I found him after listening to about 100 voice
| samples on all the different VO websites. He's fantastic! I
| don't share my sales numbers publicly, but Steam is about 70%
| of The Cat Machine sales, and about 25% is from the Apple Mac
| Store - where the game actually hasn't been published for
| about a year now, I need to get on that and reupload it. And
| games is right now my full time job, so no IP clauses needed
| negotiating, and my old employer back in 2015 was very chill
| about letting me work on my own stuff.
|
| Hope that helps!
| mrkentutbabi wrote:
| Desktop apps could be be doomed in walled garden.
| outcoldman wrote:
| Have 4 macos apps that I have built about an year ago. Getting
| 600-1500 a month.
|
| https://loshadki.app/
| loxias wrote:
| Curious to know how you approached advertising/marketing. How
| did people find your apps? How much effort and money was spent
| on finding customers?
| yboris wrote:
| My _Video Hub App_ is generating about $500 / month. It's a
| perpetual license for $5 per copy.
|
| I am planning to create another app that might generate a similar
| income stream. I've done 0 paid advertising - only some posts
| here-and-there; I would probably have more sales if I knew how to
| market my app better.
|
| https://videohubapp.com/en/ - MIT open source:
| https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
| cvhashim wrote:
| Dumb question but why don't you get some help with sales and
| marketing. Even some affiliate marketing to increase usage.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| No affiliate marketer is going to be interested in a product
| that sells for $5.
| yboris wrote:
| Unsure where to ask. Worried about high costs. Suggestions
| welcome :)
| Melatonic wrote:
| Setup a Google Adwords account - once you get the basics
| its super easy. Very cheap to start out and they used to
| have a special where you got some free adword money to play
| with on starting a new account.
|
| Generally I would say try to minimize the amount your
| spending per keyword - broader search terms or the broader
| options on those search terms always cost more.
|
| Might help a ton if you renamed your software to something
| that is more searchable (or just add some kind of name on
| the end or start)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| On a product that costs $5? Forget it. No-way you will
| get a return. (Background: making a living selling
| software online for 16 years, advertised continuously on
| Adwords for nearly all of that).
| Melatonic wrote:
| If you optimize so that you are paying maybe 2-5 cents a
| click it really just depends on the application and
| industry. Something people need to buy right then and
| there is going to have much better conversion than
| something they need to research and think about it. Plus
| there is value in just getting the name of your software
| out there and into peoples hands so that it then spreads
| organically after that.
|
| For something like this I would probably start at like
| 30$ a month and keep optimizing - worst case you lose
| only a few hundred over the course of a year.
| makz wrote:
| Related question. How to start to develop desktop applications?
| In contrast to web applications there are not many resources out
| there and most seem outdated.
| semireg wrote:
| Use Electron and leverage your web skills. Learn as much as you
| can about the architecture before you start. For example, an
| Electron app has two main processes: main and renderer. The
| main process is like your backend API and the renderer(s) are
| the browser windows. Once you get the hang of it, the world
| opens up and you can really start cranking out code/features by
| bending the entire architecture to the will of the developer...
| until it breaks, but then you get to fix it!
| exdsq wrote:
| I've not worked on a desktop app in a while but when I did,
| maybe 4 years ago, I found a lot of resources googling "MVVM
| C#" and following tutorials there. Microsoft tends to have a
| lot of decent tutorials on WPF Gui development. More recently
| I've been playing with C++ and Qt which has decent
| documentation too, but to me is _far_ more complicated than
| Visual Studio and WPF. Most C# textbooks tend to have sections
| on GUI development too.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Download Visual Studio Community Edition and go to New Project
| -> WPF project and start learning C#.
|
| That's probably the path forward with the best chance of
| overall success.
| ramoz wrote:
| This as opposed to cross-platform? Any general use case or
| for a targets Windows user base?
| fsloth wrote:
| Afaik .net _is_ cross-platform nowadays - Windows dev tools
| are likely to be most approachable though.
| jcelerier wrote:
| I'm developing https://ossia.io ; a free software for artistic
| creation (live shows, interactive installations, VJ, etc.).
|
| Between public & private grants and the occasional consulting gig
| to add a feature or support contract, I can live :)
|
| Tech stack is C++17/20 & Qt, I target Win / Mac / Linux (and
| mostly develop on Linux).
| fifticon wrote:
| I know I was just misunderstanding, but for 60 seconds I was
| skimming through the comments trying to grasp the gist of what
| software for 'living buildings' was all about, I thought it was
| some ecological concept. Anyway, I earned a living making desktop
| software until 2016; since 2016 I make Revit desktop plugins.
| sterlinm wrote:
| Bill Gates did alright :P
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| _I have to think about the future, and so I have to try to make
| the right choice on this (OP in 2016)_
|
| Well, the future is here. I guess you made the wrong choice.
| bener wrote:
| Does it make you feel better to make others feel worse?
| Splendor wrote:
| What an incredibly rude thing to say to another person.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| Wait... we're not all bots?
| high_byte wrote:
| desktop does not imply "not SaaS". I'll add that today most
| desktop apps are headless Chrome. that being said, I actually do
| web, but were I to go desktop I would look for a niche that can't
| be done in browser, even though today you already got access to
| most APIs & hardware...
| jventura wrote:
| > I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser
|
| What kind of niches would that be, beside audio/video and other
| cpu intensive things?
| ducharmdev wrote:
| On my current team we work on a cashiering desktop app, that
| needs to interact with local devices for processing checks
| and credit cards. Although almost everything reaches out to
| an API at some point, I'd generally say desktop apps are
| still relevant in cases like this.
| eldelshell wrote:
| Bluetooth PoS printers are a bitch to work with and good
| luck doing that from JS.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Stuff that needs low-level access to the file system. You can
| now handle that at a crude level with web form file uploads
| and generating dynamic data URLs for download, but it's still
| not as smooth as using the native file system.
|
| Edit: one example would be a file backup system. There's no
| way you want to make the user manually select and upload
| every single file on the HD for something like that, and (for
| obvious reasons) there's no way for a web app to scan the
| disk and read arbitrary files.
| Wistar wrote:
| Something that requires absolute real time responsiveness?
| emteycz wrote:
| There are web-based (in browser) CADs and DAWs... What sort
| of application would be more demanding?
| Wistar wrote:
| I am not sure. Something that has a lot of back and forth
| with peripherals?
| pavlov wrote:
| Anything that touches a lot of files?
| jventura wrote:
| Ok, but what kind of business niche would that be?
|
| You can also touch a lot of files on a webserver, although
| it would be a pain to upload them.
| fsloth wrote:
| For example file management. "Directory opus" is a
| windows desktop 'better explorer' in this category (I
| have bought a license myself, it's pretty darn good).
| pavlov wrote:
| Sure, a lot of people keep their stuff on somebody else's
| servers -- a.k.a. the cloud -- but there are still users
| who have plenty of local files: music, photos, code...
|
| That's a wide range of users, so I don't have a specific
| product idea, but seems like some kind of opportunity may
| exist in this niche.
|
| (If I had a product idea, I'd probably try making it
| myself -- native desktop apps are much more fun to make
| than web.)
| andai wrote:
| >native desktop apps are much more fun to make than web
|
| This has also been my experience, and I am curious what
| the reasons are. Does it have to do with the quality of
| the end result, or the process of development?
| amerkhalid wrote:
| Pretty much any webapp can be replaced with local desktop app
| for security and privacy concise people. Some of things I
| wish had desktop version:
|
| 1. CRM - I don't want to store private customer data on 3rd
| party servers.
|
| 2. Budgeting app - Used to use Quicken but it moved to web
| and I switched to Mint because it is free. I tried some free
| opensource apps but experience was not smooth. So I am
| sticking with Mint for now.
|
| 3. Trade analysis apps - Sites like TradingView or TraderVue
| are great but I don't want to put too much effort in there. I
| rather have my trading data stored locally on my machine. As
| a programmer, I export CSVs and run them in local Jupyter
| notebooks but I think a more user friendly version should be
| high in demand.
| jrockway wrote:
| I agree with that. Things like Fusion 360 are both desktop apps
| and SaaS. The desktop app checks that you have a subscription
| before it will let you use it, and various cloud things nobody
| wants are forced in. (Photoshop has a similar business model,
| now that I think about. Everyone wants to be a cloud storage
| provider instead of just taking money in exchange for a piece
| of software.)
| mrleinad wrote:
| I work for a company that sells a niche desktop app for mining
| companies, called Aegis.[1]
|
| Even if the company is planning to implement something web
| related in the near future, the business is on the desktop and
| there are no plans on taking it entirely to the web anytime soon.
| Mining companies prefer it that way, as internet connectivity is
| not something you can reliably find on site.
|
| [1] https://iring.ca
| ak39 wrote:
| Delphi?
| lsferreira42 wrote:
| It looks and feels delphi
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, consulting for enterprises doing desktop stuff for
| laboratory and factory automation is still a thing, specially in
| air gaped environments.
|
| Stuff like this, https://www.biotek.com/
|
| I have done WPF and Windows Forms for companies using such kind
| of hardware.
|
| Qt is the major alternative for these customers.
|
| Also note that iPads and Android tablets with plugged monitors
| are a kind of desktops.
| ramoz wrote:
| Also interested in folks doing this for their enterprise market
| and any available analysis on how to approach that market.
|
| My perspective is Enterprise is hard to hit with SaaS. It's also
| hard to build an integrated (AD/Network/Data/Files) desktop
| solution. It still seems more viable to start with a standalone,
| offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees
| might consider trying / e.g. something like an app that replaces
| excel with better efficiencies. Maybe while building some SaaS-
| like component (advanced processing in cloud, API integrations,
| etc) that still opens the door for non-enterprise users.
| Ultimately while building a portable/cots cloud based solution.
| Further letting you evaluate ways to pivot in either SaaS or COTs
| in the future.
|
| Im still not confident that an MVP approach shouldn't just always
| accommodate seemless accessibility (SaaS) for a larger general
| market, and that I shouldn't discount enterprise requirements for
| non-corporate LAN user bases.
| ramoz wrote:
| For reference I'm taking my shot with
| https://github.com/wailsapp/wails (webview2 supported on
| Windows) and https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js for a PDF
| processing related use case.
|
| Wails because I imagine extensive Golang based services
| (preference/experience) in any cloud env. .NET would be my
| other approach for O365 based integrations.
|
| Rust has something similar to wails, https://github.com/tauri-
| apps/tauri . Then there all the traditional native vs cross-
| platform methods.
|
| No approach, or cross platform framework, really seem quite
| right. But I figure time and money would be the important
| factors in any serious avenue I want to take things.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| ha, I'm doing the same on Mac! Reach out, maybe my (hopefully
| portable) backend/pdf module could help!
| ramoz wrote:
| Ha, cool, thanks for the insight. I'm am curios about
| potential collaborations so ill reach out soon
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > It still seems more viable to start with a standalone,
| offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees
| might consider trying / e.g. something like an app that
| replaces excel with better efficiencies. Maybe while building
| some SaaS-like component (advanced processing in cloud, API
| integrations, etc) that still opens the door for non-enterprise
| users.
|
| This is currently my approach -- not making a living (yet
| hopefully) -- but will report back soon. I have a baddie of a
| productivity tool that can fragment features to a few pay per
| use web APIs that I'll package with a front end for non-
| enterprise.
|
| A slight tangent: It's very, very challenging to enable
| collaboration in these types of environments. Magic Wormhole
| [0] has been an interesting solution I've wanted to integrate,
| but haven't yet.
|
| [0] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I been making a full-time living since 2005 selling software
| written in C++/Qt for Window and Mac.
|
| My latest product is a drag and drop tool for data transformation
| (merge, split, clean, dedupe etc):
| https://www.easydatatransform.com
|
| Things have mostly moved to web, but desktop apps still have
| major advantages in some areas: -less latency -data kept locally
| -better development tools
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I make a Mac app targeted at developers and sell around 150k euro
| worth of licenses a year. It's been my only income for the last
| ten years or so.
|
| In my case a web app just wouldn't work very well (it's hard to
| connect a web app to things behind a firewall)
|
| I'm also a firm believer in pay-once software, you still get
| recurring revenue unless you saturate the market, which a small
| company won't do anyway.
| finiteseries wrote:
| Sharing it here wouldn't even qualify as an advertisement mate,
| feel free to throw that link in there and maybe scoop up a few
| more users for your troubles.
| dgellow wrote:
| Would you mind sharing more details regarding your application?
| loxias wrote:
| I'm curious to know more, as both a potential competitor _and_
| customer :)
|
| What's the name of your app, I'd like to give it a spin.
| czeh wrote:
| I spent a few years on a side project for a 'better' screenshot
| tool: https://www.bettersnipper.com/
|
| Tried to sell it for $5 home / $14 office, but only got a handful
| of purchases. I still personally use it every day and have
| probably collect 10k+ Snips across all my computers. I converted
| the entire program from VB.NET -> C#.NET over a year which burned
| me out and I've kind of just let it wither due to lack of
| interest.
|
| I aimed for the "10x better" than free tools, but most people are
| fine with the Windows Snipping Tool. :shrug:, on to the next
| project. I recently added an achievement system and a screen Gif
| capture feature, but haven't found the energy to polish+deploy
| those.
| sockpuppet69 wrote:
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I find it hard to take seriously software that is $5. Google
| 'price as signal'. Also you are up against some very
| established and polished competitors, such as SnagIT.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Yes and no. I'm an employee so it doesn't really matter, but my
| side-project desktop apps pay well enough that I could live off
| them if I go for a student lifestyle (no pricey events, no
| restaurants, cooking yourself, cleaning yourself).
|
| It was a long way. I started in the Pro Audio niche and initially
| supported Windows, Linux, Mac. Over time, I learned the hard way
| that supporting Apple's constantly changing OS is very expensive,
| plus Mac users tend to act the most entitled when stuff doesn't
| look or feel like their native OS. And Linux just never sold a
| license, instead I got lots of Open Source bitching. So
| eventually, I dropped Linux and Mac support, doubled down on the
| new Windows APIs and then things got nicely profitable. Price is
| one-off $299 for the regular app kit with perpetual updates (so
| far). People use the apps for making movie sound effects.
| [deleted]
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Apple like to nuke their developer ecosystem from orbit on a
| regular basis. It is quite tiresome. Qt protects me from it to
| some extent, but cross platform frameworks have their own
| issues.
| bmj wrote:
| _cleaning yourself_
|
| I did not realize this was a mark of the student life. Who knew
| I was still a student at age 49?
| seb1204 wrote:
| Had to smile
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I, too, am a couple of pay raises away from paying someone
| else to clean me
| jb1991 wrote:
| As a developer mainly on Mac, which windows APIs are you
| referring to that are new, and how do you normally distribute
| your app, is it through a Windows store or independently?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| what Microsoft fat client technology are you using?
|
| the current problem for me with Microsoft fat client is there
| are too much options and no clear one that Microsoft will
| support long term.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I develop a hobby project targeting desktop Mac
| (Objective C GUI, C++ business logic) and I'm not sure what
| Windows technology I should use should I ever decide to port
| to Windows. There are so many and they are all in various
| stages of unsupported. C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML?
| WinForms? UWP? Maybe just give up on trying to read the
| future and use Qt. Fucking madness!
| jfk13 wrote:
| I faced that question over a decade ago, and after looking
| around at my options, I went with Qt. No regrets. Sure, it
| had its flaws, and sometimes the "not-quite-nativeness"
| shows through, but it worked pretty well and gave me
| support for all 3 major desktop systems. And although
| someone else has long since taken over maintenance of the
| application in question, it's still going strong (and still
| built with Qt).
| Osiris wrote:
| I have a side-project (https://batterybarpro.com) that's a native
| Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.
| pc86 wrote:
| This looks really cool, and I'm particularly impressed that
| it's a one-time purchase for lifetime access and you're still
| able to make this much off of it (and at a very reasonable
| price point). Congrats all around.
| jorams wrote:
| There's a small error in the Windows 11 warning at the top of
| the page:
|
| > removed the feature _the_ allowed for toolbars
|
| Should be _that_ , I presume.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Hi :) I've been a long time user of Battery Bar Pro. Thank you!
| Its one of the first apps that I install on my new computers.
| What would be the best way to do a feature request/bug report?
| jventura wrote:
| This kind of small tools is what I've been thinking of doing
| lately. It should not consume much of your time after you
| deploy it and there's not need to have a server and dealing
| with people's data..
|
| Small question: how do your users find your product?
| Osiris wrote:
| When I first started, I was posting about it in various
| laptop forums and running Google Ads. Having a free version
| was extremely helpful (there are hundreds of thousands of
| free users). It spread via word of mouth pretty quickly.
|
| After a while, I just stopped all marketing efforts and now
| it's all just word of mouth/google search.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Have never heard about this but this looks awesome - Gonna
| throw this on my old ass thinkpad tonight!
| anotheryou wrote:
| happy customer here :)
|
| Best part: it also shows battery health really well with
| discharge charts and can track multiple batteries (if you still
| have a laptop with which you can swap...).
| zupo wrote:
| After 15 years of SaaS-ing, myself and two collegues, everyone
| part-time, are trying to see if we can make a profitable macOS
| app: https://paretosecurity.com/. Revenue in last 30 days is
| $3000+, we started working on it back in July. So, it's
| something?
|
| That said, long-term, we expect to earn more from subscriptions
| for businesses, than we do from single-user lifetime licenses.
| But again, ATM, it's the single user licenses that sell well.
| jb1991 wrote:
| That looks like a rather useful app.
| zupo wrote:
| Thanks! And it's open source:
| https://github.com/paretoSecurity/pareto-mac/
| phkahler wrote:
| Interesting that you're selling a GPL licensed app. I think
| that's actually quite viable in many cases. I'd rather pay
| a low price and get something in the app store than have to
| build it myself.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I don't have a Mac do I'm not your target customer.
|
| However I really like your approach having a pay-once personal
| edition and a subscription team/business edition. It's
| something different from the subscription-everywhere trend.
| zupo wrote:
| I'll report back in a year or three if it does in fact work
| in real life hehe
| Melatonic wrote:
| Standard for years was perpetual license + monthly fee for
| premier support / maintenance so it is definitely a
| workable model.
| ulimn wrote:
| Being relatively new to macOS, I really like this program
| because there are settings I wouldn't even know exist. Also, it
| tells me when other programs, like docker or cyberduck have an
| update which is also nice.
| eatonphil wrote:
| I'm building a desktop-first (SaaS-eventual) data IDE for
| developers [0]. Making a living? Not yet.
|
| It being desktop-first makes it as easy to try out in a corporate
| environment as Sublime. The data never leaves your machine.
| Desktop-first is a big deal in devtools for this reason.
|
| [0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation
| webmaven wrote:
| This reminds me of OpenRefine:
|
| https://openrefine.org/
| eatonphil wrote:
| Neat project and wow acquired by Google! Good for them.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| On the other hand, downloading software to your desktop is a
| risk (cf the Solar Winds supply chain attack). I recently got
| asked to fill in 30 question risk assessment questionaire
| before someone could upgrade to the latest version of my
| software (I declined).
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| I used to until recently. A LOT of active trading software is
| still traditional desktop applications for various reason and a
| decent niche. heavy simulation software is another
| pvarangot wrote:
| I'll add music making software. I don't make it but it's been
| my only hobby since the pandemic started and I shelled some
| money on desktop apps that can easily be coded and maintained
| by a single dev, like librarian software for hardware synths
| and some VSTs to use in Ableton.
| iffycan wrote:
| I work on a desktop budgeting application. I love that it's
| desktop-only (and so do the users)! It doesn't earn a living
| (yet), but it makes more than enough to cover expenses.
|
| [0] https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com
| jwineinger wrote:
| > Buckets includes some terrific extras such as really fast
| Amazon why-do-they-split-every-purchase-into-a-hundred-
| transactions reconciliation.
|
| magnificent! I hate reconciling my amazon -- and recently
| walmart grocery pickup -- purchases for this reason.
| RandomRandy wrote:
| Your application looks really nice. What framework are you
| using for the UI?
| iffycan wrote:
| It's Electron (for now)
| bener wrote:
| I'm downloading now, this looks really nice.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Why would I want to sit at my computer to manage my budget
| instead of being able to access it anywhere? I always have a
| "computer in my pocket".
| cinntaile wrote:
| Some things are just a pain in the ass to do on a mobile
| phone I guess. Budgeting sounds like it would be.
| grumpwagon wrote:
| I just tried this out this week! It isn't going to work for my
| needs (I like having payee names to track past expenses), but
| it looks like great software, and I wouldn't hesitate to
| recommend it to people.
| alibarber wrote:
| I have worked professionally for a company that made desktop apps
| for film production (VFX), and also internally for studios in
| their R&D departments and those were also almost entirely desktop
| based.
|
| Outside of professional work, I've jumped right back in to Ham
| radio over the Corona times, there are lots of desktop
| applications in use there (DSP mainly) but usability and support
| for hardware (both devices, and platforms) is hit and miss and I
| have a few ideas for making my own versions as side projects.
| Several of these are paid - so do you have any hobbies or niche
| domains you're knowledgeable about that you could explore?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Kinda have to be desktop based if your working with VFX levels
| of change the data - the storage solutions those types of
| places need to invest in are insane!
| jimnotgym wrote:
| It is interesting that there are many ham apps that are single
| person developed and closed source, but free to download. It's
| weird how open source is not ubiquitous in that hobby. This
| leaves lots off ageing, quirky software out there.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I'm not sure how related it is, but the average age of people
| involved in ham is pretty old. I went to a few meetups near
| me and the average person there was at least 60 years old. So
| it might be that these apps are made by an older generation
| with different norms around open source. Could just be an EE
| vs CS thing too, since open source is less common the EE
| world.
| zwieback wrote:
| Inside R&D organizations there are plenty of groups building
| desktop apps for internal use. We have a ton of Forms, WPF and
| some Qt apps we use for R&D and manufacturing purposes. Also lots
| of services and other non-GUI stuff.
|
| For side-business it'll be a lot tougher than it was when I
| started 30 years ago.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Same for us in VFX mostly python though.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| i did for a while selling utilities for MMORPGs
|
| it was making some decent amount, i was a student at that time,
| so it was very satisfying experience; better than working for
| macdonald ;)
| kaetemi wrote:
| Yes. Tools for developers and artists. It's a healthy market if
| you can provide value.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| I do. Data management and visualisation for local data store.
| This stuff is private and can not really go into cloud.
|
| Was using Java Swing until very recently. Switched to Kotlin JS
| in browser, not sure it can count as desktop anymore.
| 727564797069706 wrote:
| How have your experiences with Kotlin JS been?
|
| I've been considering it for similar type of desktop app
| development, but haven't dug deeper yet. Mainly because I
| already have some experience with Rust and have been
| considering options in this space before venturing elsewhere.
| [deleted]
| fuy wrote:
| I work at Veeam, our main product
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veeam_Backup_%26_Replication) is a
| WPF desktop app. Some of the newer/smaller ones are web(React)
| based, though. UI is of course just a small part of all the stuff
| that goes in a large B2B/Enterprise app, but technically it's a
| desktop app. Also, FWIW, we do subscription licensing, so I don't
| think it's a real dichotomy.
| QuiiBz wrote:
| The guy from Inkdrop [0] makes a living with his note-taking app.
| He also has a YouTube channel [1] which I found very relaxing.
|
| [0] https://www.inkdrop.app
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/devaslife
| jarl-ragnar wrote:
| Uses a subscription pricing model though. I wonder why he
| choose that model. Personally I love the Sublime model, buy a
| license, use it anywhere.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Because a subscription pricing model brings in more money and
| a more predictable revenue stream. Most people selling apps
| on a pay-once basis can't afford to support it and develop
| new features indefinitely, so they move on to the next
| project and it goes into maintenance mode, only getting
| updates when a new OS update breaks it.
|
| Also needs to pay for the cloud servers running it lol.
| jventura wrote:
| I think it syncs the data between instances of the app (on
| the cloud - 10GB or something like that..).
| QuiiBz wrote:
| By default, it's synced on Inkdrop's servers, but you can
| self-host your own DB if you want. It's well described in
| the docs: https://docs.inkdrop.app/manual/synchronizing-in-
| the-cloud
| eps wrote:
| ... in which case paying per month makes no sense.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I follow him on YT. His videos have an amazing aesthetics, and
| the tech content displayed is simple mind blogging to me as a
| non-tech person.
| nso95 wrote:
| Mobile?
| terhechte wrote:
| I've worked for the past ~2 years (in my spare time) on a macOS /
| iPadOS presentation app: https://hyperdeck.io
|
| It isn't released yet, but I do have some loyal beta users, so
| I'm hopeful that some of them will buy the app once the last
| couple of issues are fixed.
| eps wrote:
| Plenty of people do this.
|
| Go onto any software listing site (eg. Softpedia or
| AlternativeTo), pick a not-a-brandname commercial product and
| chances are that it will be a single-person project. From things
| that are really well-polished and look like a team effort to
| pimped-up crappy weekend projects. Lots and lots are made and run
| by a single individual.
|
| Whether they _sell_ well is an altogether different question, but
| it 's generally not hard to make several $k per month off a
| decently useful consumer desktop software. All depends on the
| size of the niche, the fit (read, specialization) of the product,
| its quality and the amount of marketing effort.
|
| This business model is still often referred to as "shareware", so
| if you want to find communities of people that are involved in
| it, that'd be the keyword to search for.
| mapmap wrote:
| What is the state of the art in shareware for drop in payment /
| piracy protection?
| semireg wrote:
| As an electron developer I used NodeJS to implement a custom
| licensing system on top of JWT. My app "registers" a computer
| (fingerprint) with the server. The server can grant licenses
| where it signs a JWT with a secret key, and the client can
| verify using the public key. The client will enable features
| based on the JWT payload. Again... it's crackable, but it's
| serviceable and I make my software affordable through either
| a one-time license ($147) or a monthly subscription
| ($14.99/month).
|
| I try my best to make it "worth it" to purchase the app.
| Label LIVE is a super- boring business label printer app so
| it takes a "special" person to 1) need the app and then 2)
| decide that they'd save more money by cracking it than just
| paying for it. If I 10x my pricing (as my competition does),
| then I would fully expect users would find it worthwhile to
| crack and distribute.
| grujicd wrote:
| There are payment services which were originally made for
| desktop apps, with built in support for license files,
| downloads after payment, etc. I'm using MyCommerce (ex
| ShareIt), but also had good experience with Avangate - which
| was later purchased by 2checkout, and now renamed to
| Verifone.
| eps wrote:
| Re: payments - it depends on the country, but generally
| Stripe + PayPal + bank wires for larger/enterprise purchases.
| Alternatively, Braintree.
|
| An altogether different option is to pay 2x the commission
| and use "full-service" reseller frontends like Digital River,
| PayProGlobal, etc. These are referred to as "registrators"
| and they used to be useful, because getting a merchant
| account and processing cards was a royal pain the ass. But
| now there's Stripe, so virtually no value in them. In fact,
| they tend to make thing more difficult to the clients than
| needed to justify their own existence (like requiring phone
| numbers, calling customers back to "verify" purchases and
| other artificial b/s like that).
|
| Re: piracy protection - wildly depends on whom you ask. There
| is a camp of people that put minimum effort (literally a a
| single "if" check in the code) and embrace having their stuff
| cracked and hacked. The logic is that this acts as extra
| marketing and helps converting pirates (lol). There are also
| people who use packaged solutions like VMprotect and
| (previously) Armadillo. This tends to nip piracy in a bud,
| but creates issues with antivirus false positives. It also
| makes the software heavier and more fragile. There's also a
| middle ground of custom protection schemes that, if deployed
| wisely, can create 100x more headaches to crackers vs the
| effort spent on coding them in. Not _that_ hard to do, but
| these aren 't drop-ins, obviously.
|
| Also, closely related, is the question of how the licensing
| works. Previously, most of the shareware used completely
| offline licensing using "keys" that were either hardcoded
| into the program or verified algorithmically (read, with
| elaborate checksums and such). This caused an emergence of
| keygens and it also fed credit card fraud with people smash-
| n-grabbing keys in bulk and then published them for the
| street cred. Surprisingly, a lot of shareware still uses this
| method and they still bitch and moan about the consequences.
| The alternative, obviously, is to use online activation. That
| is, what is sold is an activation token that can be swapped
| for a machine-specific license, via an exchange with the
| licensing server. This nearly completely eliminates the CC
| fraud and it allows for finer control over licensing. There
| are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are
| really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the
| good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own
| online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days
| (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend).
| ezekg wrote:
| > There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of
| them are really quite basic and almost universally suck.
| However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out
| your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-
| days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend).
|
| I wouldn't say _all_ of them suck. But that 's because I
| built one [0] for the sole reason that, back in 2016, I too
| thought all of other ones sucked.
|
| [0]: https://keygen.sh/build-vs-buy/
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Handling taxes (VAT, sales tax) when you are selling
| worldwide is a nightmare. That is why many vendors pay the
| extra to use 'full fat' payment processors, rather than
| Stripe.
| eps wrote:
| Stripe can handle sales taxes.
|
| Also, it's worth checking with the accountants first
| before taking on a role of a tax collector. When yet
| another random country demands a sales tax on purchases
| made by its citizens, it's just a spherical pony in a
| vacuum. Best to first check if their demands have merit.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >Stripe can handle sales taxes.
|
| if so, that is a recent development.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Why bother with piracy "protection"? You're not going to keep
| ahead of dedicated pirates. Focus on features and bug fixes
| rather than going after non-customers.
|
| Every iota of effort spent going after pirates is effort not
| going into servicing existing customers or getting new ones.
| eps wrote:
| 99.9% of pirates can only nop ifs. The remaining percentage
| are the pros that either work on paid basis or go after
| high-profile apps that give them visibility and status. A
| mildly well-protected battery indicator will remain intact
| for a very long time, simply because people who'd want to
| crack it, can't, and people who can crack it, won't.
|
| PS. Having cracked versions floating around affects SEO
| ranking of the master website, it affects sales and overall
| perrception of the product and, as importantly, it also
| hits support with a lot of bogus bullshit from people that
| aren't even customers. So for every iota one may "save" by
| not adding protection, they would spend multiple iotas
| dealing with the consequences.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Shareware (at least back in the day) almost always had a free
| component. For a game that might mean levels 1-3 are free and
| then you buy the full game for the whole thing.
| RantyDave wrote:
| Probably not the answer you're looking for, but the Mac
| AppStore is the only thing at ever truly worked for me.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Yes, but the desktop computer is typically attached to a $250k
| piece of custom industrial automation, the fact that there's 200
| hours of C# programming for the HMI/ERP client/label printer/data
| logger is irrelevant to the customer, it's just a line item next
| to the PLC/robot programming, raw materials, welding,
| fabrication, wiring etc. Add some Beckhoff, Siemens or (yuck)
| Rockwell capacity to your stack - buy a used EK1100 and some IO
| cards off eBay, download TwinCat 3, and add that to your resume
| and you'll be able to build B2B products for a lot of places.
|
| There are a surprising number of "controls engineering only"
| shops, it's not clear to me how that kind of business works out
| logistically when so much of the software requires certain kinds
| performance from the hardware and vice versa.
| oleksii88 wrote:
| Working on https://folge.me app for creating documentation and
| step by step guides ( basically an advanced screenshot tool with
| editor and many export options). One-time license, and no
| recurring charges, app brings in around 400-500 EUR (500-600 USD)
| per month.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Pay close attention to how you charge. I hate giving my credit
| card information to another company, so I end up using Amazon a
| lot just to have it in one place.
|
| Similarly, with software, I am more likely to purchase desktop
| software from the MacOS app store. I feel exposed giving my
| information to a company I may not have heard of before. I do buy
| a lot of useful looking desktop software on the Mac OS app store.
|
| It must be tough converting enough customers though and pricing
| is not easy.
| smaddox wrote:
| There's plenty of people making a living off of single player
| video games.
| richharms wrote:
| 6+ years on a team of approx. 5 (BA, UX, software engineers)
| developing a Windows/WPF application to configure equipment for
| industrial process control. When I left the company just under a
| year ago additional work was being planned. It may be a
| specialized area, but desktop apps are definitely being built in
| this space - had an awful lot of fun building the app as well.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Not a self-venture but my old team built desktop applications for
| the pricing department at a very large airline. They did
| everything from recommending price changes to loading ad hoc
| adjustments and keeping track of pricing strategies. All in
| JavaFX. That team split and is making most of them web-based now
| but the desktop apps still thrive in the meantime.
| SuboptimalEng wrote:
| Atomic Edits[0] is a desktop app that helps YouTubers (like me)
| automatically remove silence in videos. It went viral on
| Reddit[1] but I realized later that building a video editing app
| with Electron (and not C++) was a bad choice. Library support
| video/audio editing was lacking.
|
| Recut[2] is an app that basically does what Atomic Edits aimed to
| do, but actually succeeded. I think it's because it was a native
| Mac app which meant it had access to better libraries for editing
| videos. (That or I gave up too early on Atomic Edits.)
|
| Orbital[3] is desktop app that allows you to search, filter,
| preview video files on your computer like YouTube. I posted on
| some subreddits and it had potential but I realized it wouldn't
| be enough to sustain me. It could've worked as a side-project (if
| I was working as a SWE) but being as my main source of income was
| from YouTube ad-revenue, it wasn't worth it.
|
| VideoHubApp[4] is a desktop app that does what Orbital aimed to
| do and actually earned a couple thousand dollars. It was started
| a few years earlier and was built with a similar tech stack.
|
| All that is to say, I made desktop apps that had potential, but
| didn't have the funds to see them to completion. Of course you
| could say it would be different if I had a SWE job + funds, but
| then I may not have had the time to learn React + Tailwind +
| Electron and complete these apps.
|
| [0] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/atomic-edits
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/ohbl6i/i_made_a_des...
|
| [2] https://getrecut.com/
|
| [3] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/orbital
|
| [4] https://videohubapp.com/en/
| Melatonic wrote:
| I hope people are still building desktop apps because as much as
| I hate that literally EVERYTHING is being made into an app on
| mobile (mainly just so they can then push notifications) there
| are a lot of things that really just run better as a desktop
| application. Do browser based video editors for example exist?
| Yes they do and I am sure they have their uses. But if I need to
| ingest a few hundred gigs of footage and cut that down to a
| reasonable length there is no way I trust Google Chrome's memory
| management to do that in any reasonable fashion.
|
| I think what I miss the most are the really lightweight desktop
| applications that use very little resources but still help
| accomplish very large things. People love to rag on Windows for
| the fact that it maintains backwards compatibility but that has
| also allowed some fairly old but amazingly efficient applications
| to still be useful today.
|
| My personal favourite example of this is a one man shop developer
| from Japan who makes some insanely reliable and useful tools on
| Windows:
|
| FastCopy:
|
| https://fastcopy.jp/
|
| This tool has been around since 2004 and the original developer
| is STILL regularly updating and improving it. It blows away every
| other file copy tool on Windows out there (even the fanciest paid
| solutions) and the interface is dead simple and easy to use while
| still offering lots of advanced features. Many years ago I had to
| regularly move terabytes and terabytes of data to external drives
| that were then driven between VFX houses in Los Angeles. A lot of
| these outfits were basically smaller startups so often we would
| have multiple drives connected over USB to a single workstation
| with a 10gig link back to the storage server. I did extensive
| testing comparing every tool out there and not only was this
| thing a little faster than even the best CLI tools it also
| destroyed the others in terms of reliably transferring data over
| connections that were not always reliable. If the USB interface
| dropped for a second a lot of the other tools would fail or start
| doing a diff compare from scratch while this thing just happily
| chugged along. And once I had set it up and enabled the right
| click menu integration it was easy to train someone who was not
| very technical to use it. It even beat every Linux based solution
| I tried in reliability.
|
| IP Messenger:
|
| https://ipmsg.org/
|
| Same guy also makes IP Messenger which is a ridiculously light
| text chatting tool. It only works over LAN (hence the name) but
| requires NO central server, has tons of customization options
| (and can also be locked down in a business environment) and is
| pretty feature rich. It is also regularly updated and is end to
| end encrypted and will run on the slowest of the slow machines.
| And it has been around since 1996!
|
| Both of these are free but I would honestly pay pretty good money
| for them if I was running my own business.
| jpeter wrote:
| I make Erp software with WPF. Yes you can still earn money doing
| that.
| semireg wrote:
| This is my 3rd (or is it 4th?) year of developing and selling
| Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels.
| Originally it only worked with USB thermal printers, but over the
| last few years it's grown into a multi-function image-rendering
| pipeline that integrates data import (via spreadsheet, CSV or
| API) with barcodes, text, image output. My app revenue eclipsed
| my iOS/NodeJS consulting in 2021 and I hope to double revenue in
| 2022. Read more at https://label.live/features.
|
| The tech stack for this app is really interesting (to me at
| least, natch). Lots of native node modules that need finesse on
| both macOS and Windows. I don't yet support Linux because out of
| thousands of users, only 2 people have emailed about Linux
| support (probably both from HN!).
|
| I really love building Electron apps. It's a total joy bringing
| something (albeit "inefficiently" wrt memory and "native"
| qualities) like this to market for a niche that's otherwise a
| dumpster fire of old and clunky 1980s-era Windows-only software.
|
| As for licensing, Label LIVE is licensed per computer. I wrote a
| custom license implementation leveraging JWT. The JWT is signed
| by my license server and the app verifies the signature and that
| the contents match the "fingerprint" of the computer being
| licensed, expiration, etc.
| OJFord wrote:
| Does it definitely not 'just work' on Linux, and the only
| people to email were those who saw 'on Mac & Windows' without
| realising it was Electron?
| semireg wrote:
| It's more than just USB, but it's the first that comes to
| mind. Label LIVE has built-in drivers that talk directly to
| USB hardware (thermal label printers). The actual "label
| printer driver" part (talking ZPL, etc) is cross-platform,
| but the middleware of handling the USB stack has many edge
| cases and hugely divergent implementations that wounded me
| greatly (since recovered, thanks!). On top of USB you have
| "system printer" queue support, local font support,
| fingerprinting the system for licensing, lib FTDI for weight
| scale integration, fabric JS w/ all the hidden beasts of
| WebGL, WASM builds for higher performance dithering,
| different sandbox requirements, app signing, app packaging...
| and those are just off the top of my head. There are probably
| a dozen more things I'm forgetting that would just wreck me
| if I wasn't mentally prepared enough.
| kuratkull wrote:
| Invalid question. Talking to hardware devices is OS based, it
| can't work accidentally.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Looks quite cool. Sadly no Linux support, but I get why (got to
| build a printing library for Brother p-touch once).
|
| However, I was about 5 minutes on your site and could not find
| a list of compatible printers. Where did you hide it :) ?
| semireg wrote:
| Sorry, it's right here: https://label.live/printers
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I don't yet support Linux because out of thousands of users,
| only 2 people have emailed about Linux support (probably both
| from HN!).
|
| I'm a little surprised to read this from an Electron dev. I
| remember reading old forum posts about how the Spotify port for
| Linux was arranged by two devs who met after work for a few
| hours and got it working well enough that Spotify let them
| release it as an unsupported client. There was one or two
| issues that had to do with importing local music, but besides
| that it ran perfectly fine. You're of course welcome to do
| whatever you want, but if your runtime is essentially a web
| browser, I doubt there's going to be much trouble getting it to
| work on Linux. But what do I know, I don't make a living off of
| printing labels...
|
| > It's a total joy bringing something like this to market for a
| niche that's otherwise a dumpster fire of old and clunky
| 1980s-era Windows-only software.
|
| Here's my grumpy old man take: I kinda prefer the clunky Delphi
| forms of yesteryear. No, they weren't very pretty, but they
| were stable and performant enough that if you bought a license,
| you could guarantee that it would run _forever_. There was a
| special kind of feeling of ownership with that software,
| because it really felt like it was tangible and "yours". I
| don't think any Electron app has ever made me feel that way; at
| best it's a begrudging relationship with software I need for
| work, at worst it's one update away from being changed enough
| that I want the old version back. Again, take this with a grain
| of salt, I don't know your heuristics here.
| semireg wrote:
| I am definitely part grumpy old neck-beard, which is why I
| offer one-time licenses and an experience that lets a user
| run 100% offline/air-gapped. You can register and license a
| computer that is only accessible via USB thumb-drive. If
| nothing changes on that computer, then the app should
| continue to run "forever."
|
| Second, auto-update is disabled by default because I don't
| want a dumb bug on my side to break someone's "it just works"
| printing system.
| pjerem wrote:
| > I remember reading old forum posts about how the Spotify
| port for Linux was arranged by two devs who met after work
| for a few hours and got it working well enough that Spotify
| let them release it as an unsupported client.
|
| IIRC, Spotify "unofficial-but-official" client largely
| predates the Electron version and this story is from the Qt
| era of Spotify (which was wonderfully light and fast).
| semireg wrote:
| I believe it for an app that's 100% hitting remote APIs and
| playing sound. In my case I'm highly dependent on the host
| OS for about a half-dozen native modules that each have
| their own ultra-finicky native build environments.
| [deleted]
| Melatonic wrote:
| Does it work with the tiny Dymo printers?
| fsloth wrote:
| A large fraction of computer games are mostly still "desktop
| apps".
|
| Lots of single person indie success stories there, such as
| "Papers please" or "Stardew valley".
|
| Seminal example in this genre is probably Minecraft (which of
| course expanded to a team before acquisition).
| boppo1 wrote:
| I don't know how much longer this will last given stadia and
| xcloud. I've been playing on them and if they improve over 5
| years' time, I could really see them becoming the standard.
| mattl wrote:
| Stadia won't be around in 5 years, it's a Google product.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I've read that they're white labeling the tech. So it won't
| be "Stadia" but it will probably still be around.
| grujicd wrote:
| I'm making Windows/.Net based app for managing queues -
| QueueExplorer. Started with MSMQ support back in 2005, now it
| supports Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ. It's old
| fashioned perpetual licensing, so revenue is a rollercoaster.
| Because of that, it's emotional rollercoaster as well. Good thing
| is you get paid for full license at the time of purchase instead
| of collecting it in 10-20 months. Bad thing is every month starts
| at zero.
|
| Although .Net went multiplatform years ago, my app relies on
| WinForms a lot so it's Win only, except through Wine. I would
| love to support Mac as well but the only realistic option looks
| to be Electron based, and it would be a significant step back for
| my Windows users. Maintaining two different GUIs looks like a
| problem for micro company.
|
| The best thing about desktop software is it can't break for all
| the users at once like server-based app can. That gives some
| piece of mind when you're micropreneur. Sure, there are bugs, but
| they affect only users who downloaded buggy version. You can't
| crash all installed instances just like that.
|
| The worst thing is, it's hard to ask for a subscription. Yes, I
| hate it as a user, but would love it as a business owner :)
|
| https://www.cogin.com
| Melatonic wrote:
| You should just sell maintenance subscriptions / better support
| tiers - lots of software companies have been doing that for
| years. Perpetual license and if it breaks for someone using it
| at home they can go to the free support forums. Large company
| that needs it fixed in a super quick turnaround? Monthly fee
| for priority.
| thom wrote:
| Any plans for Kafka support? I was frankly a bit shocked when
| Conduktor raised investment:
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/22/conduktor-which-brings-a-...
|
| If anything, it's a testament to what an absolute pain it is to
| develop on existing message queue/event streaming platforms, so
| it's clearly a valid niche.
| grujicd wrote:
| I would love to support Kafka, and even made a simple
| prototype. However, hit a brickwall when discovered that .Net
| client (by Confluent, other clients seem to be deprecated)
| does not have all the features the Java one has. For instance
| there's no way to get current consumer offsets and I think's
| something that should be available in a management app.
| coder543 wrote:
| If you really want to support Kafka, I think there are
| options. Besides the obvious option of forking the .NET
| client to add these missing features, you could also write
| some kind of "plug-in" in Java or Go or some other language
| with a fully featured client library, and communicate with
| it over some type of local RPC from your main application
| to query against Kafka. Whether it is technically feasible
| or not, it may not make business sense for you, which is
| fine, just interesting to think about the options.
|
| I'm slightly surprised that the .NET client isn't fully
| featured, but I've never tried to use Kafka from a .NET
| language before.
| rozab wrote:
| Have you looked into .NET MAUI yet? I'm cautiously optimistic,
| but haven't dug into it. Should be releasing Q2 this year.
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/maui
| throwaway204401 wrote:
| We sell a desktop app with an involvement in dev and support of
| about 0.25-0.50 FTE, with revenues in the range of $50K/month
| although it was launched 9 years ago and the first year was only
| about $2K/month. The server side is just one Windows 4GB server
| for user signups, billing and license validation. One good thing
| of desktop apps is that the server side is so cheap, you are
| basically selling IP.
|
| It has this features:
|
| * B2B in a niche market (TAM < 100K-200K users)
|
| * Some viral component so you do not have to spend money on ads
| for growth.
|
| * Sold as a subscription and only as a subscription. Don't
| innovate with licensing focus on product, this is important. When
| users have fewer buying options, they decide faster. That's why
| Steve Jobs reduced 50 Mac models to just 3.
|
| * When the subscription ends, the application must stop working.
| This is also very important. You want your entire user base to be
| able to install the last version. You do not want to support
| older versions, you only want to support one.
|
| * Has to have a very generous trial so that users have time to
| find use cases with your product. Better a trial based in actual
| usage instead of exploding trial base in calendar days. You want
| your users to actually use your product and depend on it.
| semireg wrote:
| I'd love to connect to compare notes. I'm well on way to
| $50k/month, but I have a feeling I can attain that revenue
| without a few of your bullet points.
|
| * B2B niche - agreed, this is essential
|
| * Viral component - I wish I could make label printing viral...
| but I feel like I'm dealing in the "colonoscopy of software"
| with my app
|
| * Only subscription - I agree this maximizes revenue, but I
| find subscriptions user-hostile, so I also sell a one-time
| license
|
| * Subscription expiration - obviously essential
|
| * Generous trial - agreed, essential
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Our company sells HW and SW for the dental sector.
|
| We have a desktop app that processes DICOM data to do implant
| treatment planning (where to place an implant in the patient
| jaw). Output is a STL file to print a drill guide for the oral
| surgeon to perform a guided surgery.
|
| Our desktop scanners for dental labs and our intra-oral scanners
| for dentists generate 3D meshes of the patients oral situation.
|
| Those meshes are the input data for the CAD/CAM Software my team
| builds. It is a desktop app for the digital design of dental
| restorations. The GUI is in javaFX and 3D visualization is done
| with OpenGL 4.5.
|
| Once the restorative Design is done, that app can generate many
| different output formats. Labs will feed the design files their
| local milling machine or 3D printer. Dentists can send it to
| centralized milling facilities of their choice to produce the
| crown or bridge or what have you.
|
| Some impressions can be seen here:
|
| https://youtu.be/5THQMr5SAH0
| franga2000 wrote:
| Not sure if it was your specific software, but I recently
| filmed a promo for a local dentist who was demonstrating this
| exact tech and I was blown away by how quick and accurate those
| scanner sticks are and how well the software stitched it in
| real time. How the hell can you scan something as small, wet
| and soft as the inside of a person's mouth and stitch it all
| perfectly? Seems like the absolute worst environment for
| scanning
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