When to Sell and When to Give Away
July 11, 2007 – 8:40 pm
I've been working on a new script for a photo gallery. It's been something on my to do list for ages, however with my parents away in Canada and wanting to post up photos whilst they were away, I figured I could ignore my work and knock up a quick script for them to make it easier. It's nothing major, but it's a handy script that simply reads a directory, resizes the photos into manageable sizes, then creates cropped square thumbnails, and organises all of this into one gallery per directory. All the user needs to do (at present) is FTP a directory full of photos go to a simple form, give the gallery a name and select the directory from a list.
As I said, nothing major. I've got other plans for it, to expand on the admin, set up an include that could be used in a WordPress sidebar (not a plugin as the page on plugins baffle me!), and other various ideas.
Someone once said to me, don't bother reinventing the wheel, i.e. why bother creating and offering a script that you can find in plenty of other places for free. My answer to this is simple. How many of these free scripts are secure, well written, and use decent strict markup for their HTML? WordPress is one, and I'm sure there are others, but handy little scripts that are easy to customise and use, or are not overly bloated seem few and far between.
Question is, at what point can you go from offering handy little scripts for free (which I'd probably do with this) to being in a position to sell them? Or perhaps is it best to create a basic version and offer that for free, then create a pro version and offer that at a price? This way people have had a taster of the free version eg. there's a limit on the number of galleries allowed then of course the Pro version is unlimited.
2 Responses to “When to Sell and When to Give Away”
Your gallery sounds just like the one that I developed on my site. I didn't want anything overly complex either — just show the friggin' pictures!
I'm sure that there's a market, but there are so many free photo galleries out there that it would be a tough sell. I think your ROI (investment being time) would be higher by giving it away and including a link to your site in the footer. That way when someone installs it, you have an automatic link back to your site that should help search engine rankings as well as increase visitors.
If you're a professional developer, you also get the benefit of being the first person people ask when wanting to hire someone to customize their gallery. If not, you'll at least get the increase in traffic and ad revenue.
I can say that from experiences because my steady stream of customers are generated through a few open source projects that I offer for free. They seemingly appear out of the ether from all over the world. I'd suggest not worrying about a "lite" and "pro" version and just make some great open source software that others will enjoy using and you'll probably make more money than if you sold it outright.
-Brian
http://www.brianburton.org
By Brian on Jul 12, 2007
Hi Brian, thanks for your comment. This was my other option, offer small handy scripts for free and use that to build up a reputation to then offer large, more commercialised scripts at a cost.
However, remember, just because there are plenty of free photo galleries out there, doesn't mean they're bloatfree, secure, easy to use or CSS/XHTML compliant
That's what I try and base my work on. A lot of people use coppermine, but that can be hacked. I reviewed a gallery called 'Scooch' for a magazine, and that was spammed to hell after I'd left it up for a short period of time.
Plenty of people have signed up to the Pro service offered by Flickr, so I think there are still plenty of people who would be prepared to pay a small upgrade fee if they liked the basic version. Of course, I'd have to work out how to put a restriction in place that wasn't easily changed anyhow! So perhaps the freeware version is much simpler to do
By Sarah on Jul 14, 2007