Gemma Lara Savill
Selling your own finished software
By Gemma Lara Savill
Published at January 21, 2024
It has caught my eye that recently new products are being launched with the pay-once-and-this-software-is-yours-forever versus the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. In the past software was majorly sold as a product, and then selling software as a service took over.
It is not only the payment frequency at stake here, but in the app world we also seek the freedom to choose the payment platform.
Early on, when the app market was just beginning, I launched my app on the then called Android Market (later named Google Play). My app was quite successful and brought in some revenue, but only 70% of that revenue was for the developer. The app market grew, and I also launched my app on other app stores like Samsung Apps (later named Galaxy Store), Amazon Market and finally decided to sell my own app away from the 30% app stores fee. Here I was using the "selling your own finished software" pattern, no subscription model available yet, that came later.
I then started selling my own app on my own website. It wasn't much more work. I leveraged my Android app's build, via flavors, so that I could compile the app with the different payment platforms on every product increment. I kept the billing code completely separate, as some markets wouldn't even allow one line of code that pointed to the competition. So, for example, when I compiled the Amazon app flavor, no Google Play lines of code would be in that particular compilation of my app.
I used PayPal as my private payment gateway, the fees were a lot less than 30% charged by the app stores. The problem now wasn't the fee, but the marketing. Android OS made a point of telling you that any app installed from another source different from their Google Play could be dangerous and was automatically disallowed. So users had to opt in to be able to install the app they downloaded from my website. Not great. Amazon also had this problem with their Amazon Appstore apk, they have a help page that instructed the user how to change the device settings to install their Android app downloaded from their website and not Google Play. I did the same.
Google Play was always the most successful revenue route for my app in particular. From time to time new payment methods were produced, In-App purchasing and then finally app subscription billing. I tried them all, with different degrees of success.
There was a time when Amazon launched Amazon Underground, and they paid me for the time the user used my app on their device. It never caught on, and eventually died down.
And finally, over a decade later, Google Play halved the fee they charge small developers down to the actual 15%.
Anyway, my app turned out to be a great engineering exercise throughout the years, but not a very successful business venture for me. As it was only a side project, I sadly shut it down after 13 years on the markets.
The point here is that yes, it can be done. You CAN sell your own finished piece of software, and you CAN choose your billing cycle and payment platform. We have been doing this for decades. But the market is mainly SaaS at the moment, an example that comes to mind is Adobe vs Affinity.
37 Signals are now launching a whole new range of products under this idea, once.com, and I like their arguments. I hope they succeed.
I will be very interested to see how these products evolve, and I will be watching to see if the market turns. If it does, I wouldn't mind giving it another go. I now have new exciting technical options I would like to leverage, like Kotlin Multiplatform for example.
So my plan is to be technically ready at the right moment. As I believe that it is vital for small ventures to get the business timing just right.
