Marketing and business model for a python desktop app

[pythondev]

Hi,

I am new to this forum and seeking advice for an app I wrote. The app is a visualization software I have developed over a few years for deep learning. It's written in Python an directly runs on desktop machines. It was about 1-2 months of full time implementation work and it's after all a very basic tool that fills a gap and everyone in the field may need it. I imagine that when I publish it as open source and on some internet channels it may find many users quickly.

My idea is to publish it on GitHub as open source, free for personal and academic use. For companies I am thinking of charging 2.99 per user per month (no idea if this is any reasonable number).

I am wondering if anyone has advice on if this is a good model or what are better models. Specifically I am wondering about: Since it's python code, commercial users can easily hack it and deactivate the license check. They could also just specify they are from "academia" and use it for free...

Any ideas are very welcome.

Best,

 

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[Hong_Kong]

Hi,

I am new to this forum and seeking advice for an app I wrote. The app is a visualization software I have developed over a few years for deep learning. It's written in Python an directly runs on desktop machines. It was about 1-2 months of full time implementation work and it's after all a very basic tool that fills a gap and everyone in the field may need it. I imagine that when I publish it as open source and on some internet channels it may find many users quickly.

My idea is to publish it on GitHub as open source, free for personal and academic use. For companies I am thinking of charging 2.99 per user per month (no idea if this is any reasonable number).

I am wondering if anyone has advice on if this is a good model or what are better models. Specifically I am wondering about: Since it's python code, commercial users can easily hack it and deactivate the license check. They could also just specify they are from "academia" and use it for free...

Any ideas are very welcome.

Best,

Yes that is true about the licensing. For industry users what other value skews could you offer other than just a license? Ex: support services, implementations, etc.

You could also just make your program an API then require commercial users to pay for certain types of API calls.

Ghost is an example of an opensource software that has a Pro (commercial payment plan). There are many others as well.

I'm in the datascience / AI / ML space and this is interesting.

 

[pythondev]

Yes that is true about the licensing. For industry users what other value skews could you offer other than just a license? Ex: support services, implementations, etc.

You could also just make your program an API then require commercial users to pay for certain types of API calls.

Ghost is an example of an opensource software that has a Pro (commercial payment plan). There are many others as well.

I'm in the datascience / AI / ML space and this is interesting.

Thanks for your reply, yes I'm thinking of making a split between a free and a pay version with more features.

Overall the goal is not to make much money. I imagine that if I publish the software free many people would use it. The question is how to keep the option that businesses pay...

What are you doing?