Donationware - does it work?

Well, does it?

Llamatron was a case of 'if you like it, send me a fiver', and that worked (to what extent I don't know).

However does that still work today? Or do people expect stuff to be free?

I think it depends on:
a) The quality and usability of your software.
b) Your target audience.

Generally I'd say no. And I'm one of those who donate.

If people have the option of not paying for something, they will most likely not pay for it. But if you develop something that many have found useful or would like to see continued development on, then there may be a few generous souls out there. Needless to say, I've donated a few times to folks who develop neat stuff I like to use....

Same here, but generally I find it's only tools I'd be willing to pay for - something that solves an issue.

I'm wondering if games or other entertainment software stand a chance these days.

It works just fine. You'll make more money than if you give it away for free. Generally, people do the donationware thing when it would be nice to make a little on the side, but in general, it is good enough to just get people to play. it isn't a viable business plan. But that isn't the point.

If you are expecting lots of donations, or counting on them, then you are making a mistake. If you are just looking for the satisfaction of someone giving you a small donation when they didn't have to, of course it works.

If you ask people what they think your software is worth, they'll think that giving you 50p is generous.

From experience, I have to say that you'll be lucky if anyone donates anything.

I just enjoy the coding... and knowing that something I've created might be of use to someone else.


Still, it's quite warming inside, when that single person does contribute. (Thanks Seb :-)

;-)

I'm going to have to second Brucey's comment. Everybody looks at that donate message and goes, "I bet plenty of people donate, so maybe I don't have to." Then, the problem with making people pay for a product is that then you must provide a return in the case they are unsatisfied or it doesn't work for them. Then there's the support and criticism ... I think sometimes that I'd rather just do it for free.

i agree with DampeS8N some donate others dont, for me its the satisfaction of someone giving a small donation when they didn't have to.

Make a google adense is easier than wait a donation, and you may possibly get more, you can make it work with donation if you like.

A recent thread I started on Indiegamer went off and talked about the shareware model and then opensource stuff and how games via timed demos is about 10x more effective, and how the opensource stuff get peanuts in donations. So I would say that it's probably DOESN'T work but I don't have any direct experience of this.

Hello.

I think Ziggy's doing ok with Blide though, which I believe is voluntary. Whether he's earning much from it though...

Sswift could probably give you a good answer.

Goodbye.

How does google adsense work? Say 1 page on my site is getting 100 hits a day, how does that translate to income?

About 50 pence a month if you're lucky.

I donated a tenner to Ziggy. Worth it.

well, my experience with donationware on BLIde is good, but I don't spect to earn money with it. (the amount of donnations is very poor, but they encourage me A LOT to continue the development). The thing is that development of BLIde has become more and more complicated and time demanding, and I've added to it some features that can only be activated using a comercial license (freely available to all donators), such as full intellisense for non open source modules, LUA hilighting, etc etc.

My advice is don't make donationware if you're specting to earn money. If you're creating a comercial app or game, sell it at a reasonable price. If what you want is share what you've already done, Then donationware is perfect.

I know ChrisC made SOW donationware, and got disillusioned when he only got about 4 donations over a 6 month period. He then quit the whole project.

He did get the money $400 to buy a GP2X off of us so I guess it was ok. But that was only because we needed an engine for our project. Had to start our project from scratch in the end, but thats ok. We got a brilliant expert C++ coder and are now well on the way with our new wrapper and project.

I don't think that donationware works unless you can get a huge userbase.

Sonic. It doesn't, you get paid -around- 20 to 30 cents a click on the ads.

Well there we are straight from the horses mouth. Ziggy appeciates the donations but it's not cool for earning money.

As for adsense, well you'll be lucky to see many 20-30 cent clicks since the "googleslap" a while back as many of them can only be worth a few cents. Say 100 people visit you page per day and you have a Click Through Rate of 5% (which would be pretty good) then you'll get 5 clicks and maybe a few cents each. For example one of my ads yesterday had 5 clicks and made $0.33 which is around £0.16. So you really need LOADS of traffic to make any real money. I make about 50p - £1 a day right now.

hmm... OWL averages about 20 cents a click. I've had a little under 100 clicks, and a little under 20 bucks. Hasn't been up for a whole month yet. I got most of my visitors through myspace, where they were willing, for some reason, to wildly click my ads... And to my surprise, google counts all of them..

Cod2Doc is donationware, and I got 8$ in donation in more than 3 years (0.7 cents a day)! This is 0.1% of all people who downloaded Cod2Doc.
The Blitz user community is much too small for a donationware. Wikipedia works this way, but the user base is *very* large.

yeah. You can't run a small business on donations. You can, however, pull in enough adsense to cover hosting. If I keep up my current monthly rate, I'll do a lot more than that... enough to treat myself to dinner out once in a while, maybe. That's about it.

Like I said. If you choice is between completely free, or donationware.. Then it should be obvious which will make you some money.

If the choice is between Donationware and having a demo and a full version, with the intention of making some real money. Again. Should be obvious.

It comes down to what you want to do, and how big your initial advertisement budget is.

DampeS8N: You realise you are flouting Googles terms with your encourangement to click the ads.

No. I asked them. They don't want you to encourage people to click ads by giving them a cut of it. Or with some kind of program. Pointing out that the ads are there isn't encouragement.

Common mistake, which is why I asked them.

I think if someone wants to make money from something, they should charge for it in the first place.

The 'pay me if you want' approach is never going to work. I always think "well if he's not bothered whether I pay or not, then, not!"

I agree. However, there are some really nice ways to spread that out.

Naked War has a good plan.

Another option is to give out the game for free, then charge for new chapters.

Again, you could have something like an MMO where you charge for extra things. As an example, you might be given up to 3 characters, who are a single class. Then, later on, you can send the character to school to gain a special class of skills, and that costs money. They wouldn't be more powerful on their own, but can be in the right combos.

Again, you can do the same thing with special items, or whatever. Basicly, you get more if you pay, but you don't have to.

The longer someone plays the free game, especially if there is a story or online play where they can see their friends who can have the paid content. The more likely they are to buy more.

Could be an adventure game series where the first installment is free, and hooks the player. If they really enjoy the game, the 5-10$ for the next chapter will seem like a bargain, and they'll fork it over.. and you can repeat that for however many chapters you want.

http://pes4online.acsv.net

I made about £500 - £600 in donations ?

Pretty impressive.

Yeah that's not a bad sum of money.

It seems 'really useful' stuff, where people can appreciate the effort gone into something, is the best way to draw in donations.

There are (ahem) certain sites that'll pay you if you redirect traffic to them....

That and build a community around your software!

If you release a game that is stand alone download and play no one is connected. No one has a reason to revisit the site they got the game from. No interaction, no motivation to donate or proceed any further.

Now. If you build a game. Build that game so that user content can be created and shared via a website. Give a reason for users to visit a forum or chat room. Make them want to come back and reuse the community aspect. This is the reason pes4online received donations.

Just try and picture what you would donate and where. If blitzmax was released for free I know I would donate as it has a brilliant community and i use the product every day. blitzmax is one of the only forums i visit daily (even if just to read nowadays).

blah blah blah :)

ta ta

About 3 or 4 years ago, I released a niche program as donationware. After 5 or 6 months, and around three hundred downloads, I had one guy send me $5.

I then released a new version of the same program, with a couple of extra features (nothing groundbreaking), and made it shareware. Within the first week, I had 10 people buy it for $9.95 a pop. Many more followed after that.

With Fontext I initially sold it and managed to sell over a 100 licenses, which encouraged me to support it etc. Then I made it freeware as I'd covered my costs and a bit more. I think doing it this way round might be better than donateware.

arent you fooling your customers that way? and: will it work more than once? i mean: if i know, you're releasing your prdocuts for free after some time, why should a buy it now?

As one of said customers, I can say that I don't feel fooled at all. Fontext was worth every penny and then some. The fact that you can get it for free today, doesn't make my original purchase worth any less. I can't remember what ridiculously low price Beaker sold it for, but it was way less than I would expect to pay a programmer for a days work, and it saved me much, much more time than a days work.

Of course for some strange reason people where plenty angry with Rob Hutchinson for doing (more or less) the same with ProteanIDE.

Because you need/want it now, and not in 4(?) years time?

I bought Protean and it was worth it. When he made it free it didn't bother me. I bought it cos I needed at the time. Waiting a year would not have been viable. Coulda done with some better support on Protean whilst it wasn't free but Rob obvisouly didn't have enough time so he decided to make it free to de-obligate himself to support (as well as other reasons).

Depends what you mean by 'work'. If you mean 'can I make a decent amount of money?', the answer is almost certainly no - no matter how great your app is, or how incredibly useful people may find it. You'll likely get lots of emails saying 'Wow, great! Thanks!' with a tech support question tacked on the end, but these wont' be matched by donations.

Personally, this situation doesn't bother me. Although, I have had several donations - one for 100 Euros, but that involved doing some extra work.

So, basically, if you want to try and make some money, charge for it. You may only sell one or two copies, but this is likely to bag you more money than you'll every receive in donations.

I never had any plans to release it for free, and don't have any plans to make any future software free, so the answer is: "no, no, and because you may want to (no one is forcing you)."

I don't think I annoyed any customers, because a) the license was very cheap to begin with, and b) I'd stopped selling it for a long time (over 6 months) before making it free, which meant that all customers support/update licenses had expired anyways.

Along the way I also swapped product licenses with some other blitz developers, and handed out a few freebies to developers I thought had been generous to other users on these forums (and others).

I never made Fontext for the money (it was primarily for my own use) but thought it a shame if others wouldn't get to enjoy it. But, I didn't want to put in the extra work/expense required (website, docs, bug fixing) without financial support.

Yeah I've bought fontext, protean, plus tons of other addons for Blitz3D.

I'll echo what others have said - I was glad that the author's have changed to make their products free - it's a generous move that opens up the product to a wider userbase, which also allows for more openness about how to use them, how to workaround issues and so on.

You pay for a product because you believe it provides some benefit to you at that time. If it then drops in value or becomes free to others, so what.