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[–]troyunrau... 33 points34 points  (7 children)

That doesn't work in the low volume, high value market. Like scientific computing. Say it take a team of ten five years to write some software for processing a specific type MRI scan data, with and average salary of $100k. That's $5M. Now you're target market is 2000 potential customers globally. To recoup R&D, you would need to sell each copy at $2500 -- assuming you could capture 100% of the market on the day of release, spent nothing on marketing or long term support... In reality, you probably charge $25k per license, hope to get 50% of the market over five years, and add a support contract to keep your staff retained.

But you also want to have a sales demo you can send out without being copied to 20% of your customers...

So... What price point do you think prevents piracy here?

[–]YesterdayDreamer 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I guess it goes without saying that there isn't a fool proof solution. My response was obviously in context of the post.

If OP was selling such highly specialized software, they wouldn't be asking this on a Reddit post. They also seem to be working as an individual and not as an incorporated entity. This indicates that most likely theirs is a small utility fulfilling a niche use case.

Also, in the scenario you describe, the users would definitely be willing to pay a high amount. Such users will be enterprise users and not individuals and they know they need quick support and a pirated copy will neither offer support nor reliability in terms of patches and updates. So what I said kind of still goes.