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Anybody sell software that's not SaaS?

Obviously everyone's building SaaS these days, but I'm curious if any of you sell software for one-time use, like you would sell an e-book.

I guess the closest software equivalent would be for something like a Wordpress template, or a license to use a library you wrote.

I'm exploring making a single-use UI product and am wondering if there are others that have gone down this road.

  • What kinds of products do you sell?
  • How has it gone for you from a revenue standpoint? Do you find that revenue tapers off and you need to make a new product from time to time?
  • What kinds of tools do you use to sell this product, or gate it's use to your paying customers?
  1. 5

    I’m selling a JavaScript image editor component (https://pqina.nl/doka) it’s sold under a perpetual license, which means customers can still use Doka even after their subscription expires.

    The yearly subscription includes updates and support. Once the subscription expires customers retain access to the versions released before the expire date.

    The price of a subscription is locked so as the price of the product rises customers get kind of a future/early adopter discount.

    On average revenue is still growing (after two years, currently at around 10K / month). I was previously selling products on CodeCanyon but the price point and license model (life time updates) didn’t make it possible to live of one product. This forced me to build more and more products which made support time sky rocket. Now I can focus on making one product better and better. I would definitely try to steer clear of having multiple different products, could have a family of products of course. I advise selling access to updates, I found it’s the only thing customers are willing to stay subscribed for.

    Currently I sell my license keys on Gumroad. Customers can then use the license key to register the purchase in my customer portal where they can download the software package and submit support tickets.

    Happy to answer any other questions :)

    1. 1

      Doka is awesome, the UI is super clean! Im building a UI component that would also require integration like Doka, just curious how do you promote your product since your target audience i'm guessing is devs?

      1. 2

        Awesome!

        I write articles and find devs that are interested in affiliate deals. Best traffic generator is FilePond which is free.

    2. 1

      First of all, Doka is SO SLICK. Great work on this product!

      Second of all, I really appreciate the input. Has definitely been helpful as I consider a somewhat similar model.

      • Why did you pick Gumroad? What benefits does that have over just having a stripe checkout to receive a license? I know that a lot of people like it because it gives you a landing page and discoverable in search, but obviously you've got the coding chops to do all that yourself.
      • For the license keys, how does Gumroad integrate with your customer portal? For example, if someone cancels their yearly subscription, how do you know that they shouldn't be installing a new update?

      Really appreciate your insight. My offering (still working through ideation/validation so keeping it under wraps for now) would be basically premium content on my site, and each piece of content would be purchased individually. Although I wouldn't stop a user from coming back to go through the experience again, it's much more single use than a product like yours that gets integrated into the buyer's.

      There's tons of tools for paid content with a recurring payment model, but that doesn't really make sense for my offering, so I want to charge once for access. Currently considering using something like gumroad to deliver a license key, or piecing together a stripe payment flow with an airtable CRM, which integrates with my site to check if the license key is valid.

      1. 1

        Thanks!

        To answer your questions. I went with Gumroad because they handle VAT which is kind of a mess in the EU. When I have time I’ll probably switch over business transactions to Stripe but at this point I think it’s still better to focus on my product.

        Once customers buy they register the license key on the PQINA customer portal. It then knows when the license expires, so when the customer logs in after the subscription has expired the systems checks if the customer renewed, if so, all good, if not, ask to renew and limit options. :)

  2. 2

    Hello there,
    Not sure it applies as "software" but we've made a designer logo generator. Our unique value is that every logo was designed in house, and gets adjusted automatically to the personality of each customer / startup.

    Revenue tapers off as soon as we stop actively promoting it, so we're aiming to create weekly content to keep getting new people to the site. The end goal is to grow our audience progressively and get more of a solid spot on Search engines and various communities.

    The nature of our product meant that we had to build a whole platform around it, so it's not like we can sell it on gumroad 😅. We use Stripe checkout for payments.

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      nice im making yet another email generation tool, just curious what you use to promote you app?

      1. 2

        Hey there,
        We put it in a lot of directories, as well as participate on IH and reddit for visibility. Thanks to that, we've been featured in a couple of newsletters and blogposts. Still focused heavily on the product at this stage though, we'll ramp up promotion a bit later.

        1. 2

          nice, i will have to get that going. thanks a bunch for the info

    2. 2

      Thanks, that is helpful! So your users create the logo, then create an account and submit payment via stripe, and then get to download the logo in your authenticated pages. Or do you deliver via email once stripe lets your site know that it's complete?

      Could someone technically pay for and make 2 logos?

      How have you found working with the stripe integration to unlock functionality in your web app for their account? I'm sure (or I hope) Stripe makes it as easy as possible, but I've never integrated with Stripe and am curious about the experience from someone that has.

      1. 1

        The order process is still barebones, it just triggers an email that sends the full logo package to someone, we don't have a "user account" page setup. People can buy as many logos as they want, which has happened a couple times. I will report back when we build the account functionality, and see how unlocking works with Stripe. So far, their platform has been a really good fit for us, and saved us a lot of times.

  3. 2

    My trajectory is to build graphic packs and visual tools and sell as both one-time products or access to the entire library at a yearly rate. I’ve bought from ls.graphics who uses this model well... but I’m in the early stages. I run a site (SVGbackgrounds.com) that earns a monthly rev ($500/mo), and I could build that up, but I wanted to build one brand for all my future products (visiwig.com) which is a few months old... got only one sale there.

    1. 2

      Very cool background site! I'm going to use one (with attribution of course) on my data blog

  4. 1

    Selling two types items, via two different sites:

    1. eBook (PDF) - here

    Simple 1-time purchase and download. All managed by WordPress + WooCommerce. Payment options include Credit Card & PayPal, both managed via our PayPal Pro account.

    Very low sales volume atm (no marketing), but rather consistent.

    1. WooCommerce Extension (a WP plugin) - here

    Using WordPress + WooCommerce + WooCommerce API Manager
    PayPal Pro for Credit Card & PayPal payments
    Codebase is managed in Github

    License is active 1 year, and after that, software gets disabled. Customers can purchase a new license, get new License Key and re-activate the software.

    Truth is that any good WP developer could remove the licensing stuff, but it's a deterrent for most regular businesses.

    Have been considering using WooCommerce Subscriptions to auto-renew yearly license, but haven't invested the time to do that yet.

    Now that the product is rather mature, and I've tried to make sure the online docs are complete, I don't get many support requests. In fact, I don't think I've received any inquiries since September, but the sales have been pretty consistent.

    Revenue is growing/compounding yearly. LMK if you have any questions.

  5. 1
    • https://papereditor.app
    • I am not actively marketing it, so revenue is pretty weak. At the same time, it has been quite consistent for the whole time since I launched it about 4 years ago. Having 0 infra costs also means that everything apart from Apple's dev fee and domain renewal is profit.
    • Freemium. You can use Pro Features for free, but while they are active you will get a popup from time to time asking to purchase them or reset to defaults (something similar to Sublime). If you don't use Pro Feature the app has no limitations. Free forever.
  6. 1

    I'm selling WP plugins. They're seasonal though. But sells pretty good in winter. This one sells the best https://www.wpmaniax.com/wp-snow-effect-pro/

    I'm using Paddle to handle payments.

    1. 1

      How's your experience with Paddle? The checkout experience is rather weird IMO telling the buyer the purchase is with Paddle, and not with you.

      Seems like a buyer might be confused with that messaging (below). Also, if they don't see the banner at the bottom, then what do they think when they see "Paddle" on their credit card statement?

      ---------------------
      This order process is conducted by our online reseller & Merchant of Record, Paddle.com, who also handle order related inquiries and returns.
      ---------------------

      Would love to hear your thoughts.

      1. 1

        It's because they act as a reseller. And that's the best part about it because they completely handle VAT for you if you're from EU. Even if you're not from EU you have to collect VAT from EU users. So the order is made actually with them, not with you.
        I don't want to handle VAT on my own because it's a nightmare for Indie maker.

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          Yeah, I totally get that part about handling VAT. Definitely can see how it makes things easier for you (the business).

          Was more curious about the user perception, and whether or not abandonment rate would be higher.

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            Maybe I'll install Smartlook or something like that to get more insights on this. Can't answer this question without that.

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              Agreed. Curious as to what Smartlook will capture once the Paddle overlay gets triggered.

              I've used it [Smartlook] before and it is quite helpful.

              Only challenge I see is that you don't have something to compare it to. But, maybe you'll get an idea about how many people start "checkout" but don't complete.

  7. 1

    I built Write/Sprint a while ago and still make a few sales of it here and there. It was really a project to help me learn to build desktop apps but it was also a cool experiment to see if people would pay for software that wasn’t of the subscription model.

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