Can a single developer still make money with shareware?
- by Wouter van Nifterick
I'm wondering if the shareware concept is dead nowadays.
Like most developers, I've built up quite a collection of self-made tools and code libraries that help me to be productive.
Some examples to give you an idea of the type of thing I'm talking about:
A self-learning program that renames and orders all my mp3 files and adds information to the id3 tags;
A Delphi component that wraps the Google Maps API;
A text-to-singing-voice converter for musical purposes;
A program to control a music synthesizer;
A Gps-log <- KML <- ESRI-shapefile converter;
I've got one of these already freely downloadable on my website, and on average it gets downloaded about a 150 times per month. Let's say I'd start charging 15 euro's for it; would there actually be people who buy it? How many? What would it depend on?
If I could get some money for some of these, I'd finish them up a bit and put them online, but without that, I probably won't bother. Maintaining a SourceForge project is not very rewarding by itself.
Is there anyone who is making money with shareware? How much? Any tips?
