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I'm not 100% sure what is your experience with others but these kind of people are pathological customers. At least in my business.

You can test this by adding something like this to your honeypot page or home page:

  if you have do not financial needs or you are student 
  please email us and we can discuss how to you can get
  software at discounted rate or free.

And you will get just bunch of hate emails. And we even decided: "who ever writes us an email that email contains "thank you" to "please" phrase (or nice in any other way) they will get our service for free". Just that: just be nice and you will get it free. And you know what: you will get maybe two or three emails in a year which have "thank you" or "please" in the email. All other emails will be rude emails demanding something. Like "I'm retired I do not have money to pay for your shit. Give me free or fuck yourself" (actual email).

It very much depends on the market. Someone pirating a $40 table plan program is almost certainly pathological, granted. A lot of other software is totally unaffordable for keen amateurs or people in developing countries.

In my field (music technology), most software ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. A serious composer might have $30,000 worth of software licenses. Cut-down licenses are usually available, but they're often too barebones to be useful; paying for software that's worse than the pirated version is difficult to stomach if you're on a tight budget.

I fully understand why a 19-year-old EDM producer might choose to torrent Ableton Suite and Komplete Ultimate, rather than trying to find $2,000 for full licenses or paying $300 for a tiny fraction of the full functionality. Even the cut-down licenses seem absurdly expensive if your price anchor for software is $0.99.

It's a really difficult problem and I'm not sure what the solution is. I suspect that there's now a tragedy of the commons problem - piracy is so rampant that the costs are being priced into software, which just makes it less affordable. The minority who do pay for their software are subsidising the majority who don't. Heavy-duty DRM solutions like iLok[0] have barely made a dent on the problem and created a huge amount of annoyance for legitimate customers.

The bigger players are deeply integrating their software with proprietary hardware[1][2][3], which seems to be a promising approach.

[0]https://www.ilok.com/

[1]https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/prod...

[2]https://www.ableton.com/en/push/

[3]http://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html

I don't think the makers of software costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit are the target audience of the article.

> Even the cut-down licenses seem absurdly expensive if your price anchor for software is $0.99.

If your price anchor for software is $0.99, you're not going to be able to afford any software that's worth more than $0.99. The music software you refer to is certainly worth more than that. I agree that it shouldn't have to cost $30,000 for a serious composer to have the tools they need; but I don't think it should cost $0.99 either. There is a lot of value in that software.

> It's a really difficult problem

I think a big part of the problem is that much software, like the music software you refer to, has a very small market. Yes, "very small" is a relative term, but what I'm comparing it to is, for example, the market for Microsoft Office. The main buyers in that market are large corporations and organizations, that buy thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of copies every few years. That's why Microsoft can afford to give heavy discounts to many other buyers, like students: those buyers are just a trickle anyway compared to their main revenue stream, and giving the discounts is probably a net win anyway once you factor in PR and lock-in (after all, the large corporations buying Office know that everybody learns how to use it in school).

There is no counterpart to those huge corporate buyers in markets like the one for music software. So the makers of software that sells in those markets simply can't afford to offer the kinds of pricing tiers that Microsoft can; they would go out of business.

Or maybe when they searched for a crack and found your smug page, they get pissed because they were trapped, and some get even more pissed when they were instructed to beg for a license. I wonder if you see a difference if you just put out a button on the page (that is not searchable by an engine) with a 75% off coupon, so they feel like they 'saved' the money by just being smarter than other people. To you as a software developer, I don't think it will hurt the business because those are the ones that aren't going to pay the full price anyway (and because the coupon cannot be shared/searched as a standard discount, you won't risk people who are willing to pay the full price).

We had it on pricing page. But it does not matter - because that is not the point. You should not have these kind of people (rude, pathological, etc.) as customers because they will hurt your business. If you cannot get money from somebody at least that person needs to be nice so that your support is not stressed out, you have pleasure working with that person, etc.

If you don't want them as your customers in the first place, then why bother setting up the honeypot to trap them and convince them to pay?

> If you don't want them as your customers in the first place,

> then why bother setting up the honeypot to trap them and

> convince them to pay?

Because stupid me was thinking that people who are looking for discount / free do not have money (students, financial difficulties, etc.) and they need help. No - that is not the case. Majority of people who are looking for discount / free are pathological.

I don't know about you and how you set up your page, but I think how you approach those people matter too.

I have seen Parted Magic's author, Patrick, being a pain in the ass about offering a free student version [1]. So in that case, technically a student version is provided, I don't think anyone would ever choose to beg for the license, or they will send an email and say mean things. Of course, his intention might be good, but with that page, no one would want to take his good intention.

Case in point, so even I was a student, I still chose to pay full price for Parted Magic after reading that (not very happy, but OK), and got a download link to a version that had a bug (very disappointed). So what did I do? I didn't bother to ask the author for anything, fearing I will upset him, and just went ahead and downloaded another version on thepiratebay that works.

Can it be handled differently instead of having that page ranting about people being assholes? I think so. Just ask them to verify the .edu address automatically by sending them an automated email. I am sure I am so much happier being offered a 50% discount being a student and get verified automatically than to get a free version when I beg.

https://partedmagic.com/students/

You've been giving valuable insight in these posts, but that page isn't asking for begging, the message is simply "be a legit student".

I think having to provide a scanned ID and driver's license, and being reminded "you can't afford it?" and "have some self respect" is far from requesting the person just "being a legit student." It is saying I don't trust you being a good person by default, and I pity you for not being able to pay for it. You give discount or free program then just do it, like how MS do dreamspark, don't do it and antagonize people like that. Everyone knows that a person having to resort to those kinds of discounts are tight on budget - they aren't willing to pay whatever the price the author asks. Rubbing on those aspects is, to me, being a pain in the ass - which the author does have a right to.

But everyone else does have a right to what they do as well, to which they might choose to either unhappily not take that offer and pay, or unhappily not take that offer and pirate. In which case, the whole discounted/free student thing becomes a joke, rather than actually helping anyone.

Now you've become another one of the angry people who's angry that everyone else is so angry.

The article's author is Andy Brice. I see no evidence that HN user tlogan setup a honeypot page, let alone a "smug" one. As tlogan claimed, the ability to get a discounted or free copy was directly on their pricing page.

This is why I am always polite when I have to deal with customer service, the guy at the drive-thru, anything like that.

The general public is (generally, heh) self-entitled and abusive, so a polite tone and a smile can go a long way.

I think msft well understands the value of letting your product get pirated (within reason: you still need a "crack").

Of course this lets the pathological people cheat and get your system for free, but it also lets students learn and use your product so when they graduate to money makers (and decision makers) they will naturally gravitate towards msft products.

What would you say if someone offered to mail cash to you? Or asked if you accept Bitcoin?

Anecdote: Bingo Card Creator got a lot of customers from the checking account generations. Anyone offering to send in a check (or pay via a school purchase order) got the software for free, because accepting a check would cost us more than the value of the software.

If the email was nice (no profanities, thank you or something) we will just give it free - just keep it simple.

The point I'm trying to make here is that offering something cheaper via webpage will attract wrong type of people (patio11 calls them pathological customers).

I think there was also 37signals post about why they do not offer discounts for students or similar.

In short, just keep it simple as Veen said: If I offer a service or product to what I assume are reasonable, rational, intelligent human beings, the deal is this: you pay me what I ask and you get the service I'm offering at that price.

Yes, that's fair enough.

But the point is that there are people who would pay you, but can't do so using credit cards. That's pretty common in parts of Africa, Middle East, etc.

Sure - as you probably know if run a SaaS business you will be receiving requests for users wanting to pay using alternate methods (Orange payment, invoices, bitcoin, onecoin, etc.). But not via this email: these were normal support requests.

To me this seems like an odd way to approach customer acquisition. If I offer a service or product to what I assume are reasonable, rational, intelligent human beings, the deal is this: you pay me what I ask and you get the service I'm offering at that price. No other deal, accommodation, or offer is on the table. My services don't include being your therapist, your mother, your whipping boy, or anything other than a person who will sell you a product or service and treat you with the respect you're accorded as a fellow human being in the world.

Your status as a customer gives you no more rights than that. You are not, by virtue of being my customer, excused the normal standard of interaction with a social equal. You are not entitled to take my offering without recompense. You are not entitled to abuse me or in any other way behave in an uncivilized manner.

If that arrangement is not amaenable to you because you suffer from a deficiency of character or intelligence, that's not something I feel obligated to accommodate.

I sympathize with your view. I think this approach would be fine in a world with 'good guys' who always pay and 'bad guys' who never pay. But many people fall on a bell curve between these 2 extremes (this is backed up by the work of Dan Ariely on honesty). And some these people on the curve might 'do the right thing' with a nudge in that direction.

Back in the day I sold shareware which used successive keyed hashes to generate the registration key. While they key generator used all the keys the software only validated against the first n keys. When the software was inevitably cracked and a key generator was published the software would be updated to validate n+1 keys which would render the cracked keys unusable.

This left hundreds of pages of invalid keys across various crack sites with no way for anyone searching on Google to separate the needles from the haystack.

The software phoned home during the registration process as well and our analytics showed that 30% of our paying customers had gone to one or more crack sites and attempted to enter a product key before eventually deciding to purchase the software. This was a utility in the $20 to $30 dollar range so cost wasn't a major factor.

Or it means the customer is a teenager for whom the quoted price might as well be "infinity dollars."

Even if affordable, they probably don't have a way to make electronic payments without involving parents, and that's icky.

16-year-old me wanted to use professional media production tools. The combined price of Creative Suite, Logic Pro, and Final Cut was more money than I had ever seen in my life. That didn't stop me.

In college, I finally got legitimate access via site licensing and media computer labs. Lost it when I graduated.

As a working professional (not in media production), if the need came up I'd pay for any of those products easily.

I got my start using pirated Macromedia and Adobe products and now I'm a full paying customer. Product suits like this would greatly benefit from giving schools access to free student licenses to get young people hooked and trained on their products so when they enter the workforce they're ready to pay for it.

Or even better: the Microsoft approach of giving students everything for free, so there's no reason for colleges not to use Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, C#, you name it. They're all good products, so there's little reason not to use all this free Microsoft software and teaching material. I don't think I've seen many European IT college graduates who weren't basically Microsoft schooled, with a small side of HTML and Java.

Of course, computer science is a little more agnostic. Universities in general are, where they even accept digital documents that are PDF. But Microsoft's model seems to be very effective. It doesn't cost them anything to give people something they wouldn't be able to pay for, and it gets them, like you said, hooked and trained.

> it means someone thinks that the software isn't worth the value being asked

Um... or it means, that it means that (utility - list price) < (utility - FREE).

If there are no consequences, a HUGE number of people are happy to just get something for free. And frankly, with enforcement near 0, it's a logical conclusion.

It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with your price. It means people are happy to steal if they won't get caught.

I think it's more like

(utility - list price cost) < (utility - finding a crack cost)

Finding and using a crack is does not cost nothing, it takes time and effort. In the past it might have been easier, nowadays it's very hard to be able to download a legitimate crack .exe file over HTTP. It's almost guaranteed that the file is a malware or adware. Do people know that? I think unless this is the first time they pirate something, they know.

Sure - it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the price. It means that the people who choose to find a crack think their time and safety is worth trading for not having to pay for your software. It means that some of them might buy it if they see a lower price.

> When searching for the crack, it means someone thinks that the software isn't worth the value being asked

Why would you think that is true in general? People even pirate $1 phone apps. Someone can think an app is worth the money but would still rather take it for free if they can get away with it. If they're taking the time to pirate the app and use it then it's presumably worth something to them.

>If they're taking the time to pirate the app and use it then it's presumably worth something to them.

There is no dispute that they see the value in being able to use the software. The question is at what cost?

In economics terms, pirating costs the person too (time to find a working crack+frustration+malware risks+no updates/support). If a person chose to pirate it, it means that all those costs they have to pay by pirating have to be perceived to be less than the cost to get a software license. In rare cases it might not be true, for example, people in third world countries might not be able to pay, or people who have the habit of doing that. But that, in general, I believe is true.

I think it explains a lot how people don't generally pirate movies and music nowadays. Streaming and buying it legit is the lesser cost to pay. People pirate $1 games because people who have time to play games often have a lot of disposable time, including time figuring out how to pirate games.

I disagree. If the 'customer' has gone as far to search cracked version, they obviously do see the value in the software. I'm sure everybody sees the value of Microsoft Windows, but there are certain parts of the world where nobody pays for it.

Many newspapers are still sold using the honor system (collect a newspaper, put the money in a pot). In such a system where it is easy to steal (which is similar to software piracy), there are many people for who 'opportunistic theft' is a default behavior.

> If the 'customer' has gone as far to search cracked version, they obviously do see the value in the software. I'm sure everybody sees the value of Microsoft Windows, but there are certain parts of the world where nobody pays for it.

There is no dispute that people see values in Windows or OP's software, I think the better way to think about it is at what cost? The cost to go around the net searching for a cracked version for two hours until they find something that actually works, or actually buying it outright in 5 minutes. The answer for a person who makes $7.5 per hour might be different from the answer for a person who makes $30 per hour. I think that it's a reasonable assumption that at different prices, different numbers of people will choose to pirate the software because they perceive the costs differently.

About the fact that in some regions, people mostly pirated: I was in one of those third world countries. It wasn't because there weren't people who aren't willing to pay for it, it was because, for 99% of people, there was no way to pay for it. In which case, telling the person to pay anyway like OP did wouldn't help.

Moreover, it is a feedback loop too, because when you're in those places, pirating is the norm and a person don't have to search for the net for 2 hours to do it, they walk 2 steps to a CD stand that offers it. makes it much more _economically sound_ (not only in the monetary sense). In which case you will have to have a very strong incentive to make people switch to a legitimate system. But that is not impossible -- if Windows was free to get in those places, then do people still go through the pain to use GNU+Linux? It turned out that people still did because Linux provides something Windows doesn't. What can you provide in those places to get people who can afford the software to start using the legit version of your software?

Lol $7 per hour? When I was pirating software by default, I was making more like $4 per hour. At a "few hours per day" job alongside high school.

You betcha I pirated everything. A Windows license was like 1 or 2 months of my work.

Oh and I was really well paid for a high schooler. Those of my friends who did have jobs made more like $2 per hour.

Windows 10 is free. Or rather you can download it, install it and simply opt not to enter a license key, legally and with Microsoft's blessing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/272201/all-th...

Valid point, but searching for the 'cracked' version could also be cultural. It's not like people could not afford, they would prefer to 'feel smart' by having the cracked version instead. For that sake, this 'honeypot page' is good, but could include more info on why paying is so important to keep the lights on.

He says he gets conversion sales from the page. So some people searching for the crack must find it to be worth the price.

They were never going to buy a single license or in some cases an additional license

There are a lot of apps that make you buy a license for pc and your mobile devices

Aggravating

While I agree with your ideas but isn't giving them a discount = rewarding bad behavior?

It just gives the wrong idea and is unfair to other customers.

Companies selling stuff much more expensive for the early adopters because they know the customers are willing to pay for it. As long as you're making profit, you should sell to everyone at the maximum price they're willing to pay for. Selling something = maximizing profit or sales, not "making it fair for everyone." You'll see it a lot of that in Kickstarter's tiered-reward structure or processors being sold nowadays.

If a person values my software at $100 and 5 others value it at $20, I am better off selling it for all of them and get $200. If I had wanted to make it fair for everyone I have to set it at $100 which I will get $100, or $20 and get $120.

To give people the impression that I am making it fair to everyone is not hard. I just produce different "editions" of the same software. But under the hood, I don't think it is about making it fair.

Selling the same thing to different groups of people at different prices is called price discrimination and can be illegal.

That's true, but selling marginally different "models" or "editions" of the same thing, in the hope that people will self-select according to their budget, is called market segmentation and is ubiquitous across many different industries.

It's not discriminatory, because you allow any customer to buy any product they wish.

Interesting, where is this illegal, and what aspect of it makes illegal? In the US it's extremely common in the form of student or senior citizen discounts. Nearly all airline tickets seem to be sold at very different prices for exactly the same good.

As for most business to business transactions that involve a sales team, consistent pricing for identical products and volumes would be the exception to the norm for most industries.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

    In order for substantive portions of the Robinson-Patman Act to be invoked, there must be:

    * two or more sales must have been consummated
    * in a reasonably close time period
    * of commodities of like grade and quality
    * with a different price
    * by the same seller
    * to two or more different purchasers
    * for use, consumption, or resale within the United States
    * which may result in competitive injury.

The key here is

>which may result in competitive injury

It is, in short, "you can't sell an apple to your favorite customer for 20% less than other customers just to help them kill off their competition." All the rest is just hurdle-clearing to address various defenses to the "this was pure competition-killing." It's an anti-trust law.

Price discrimination without anti-competitive traits is legal ("Price discriminations are generally lawful, particularly if they reflect the different costs of dealing with different buyers or are the result of a seller's attempts to meet a competitor's offering.")

> Nearly all airline tickets seem to be sold at very different prices for exactly the same good.

There's nothing illegal about the same product being sold at different prices at different times. Or at different prices from different retailers. Or about slightly different products being sold at wildly different prices (ticket allows changes or cancellations, for example).

Airline ticket price variation is mostly due to those things, none of which is directly discriminatory in the sense of offering different prices to different people. Although they are all, to some extent, deliberate market segmentation (trying to encourage people with higher budgets to pay more).

Sometimes it's a matter of the law not being enforced. In the case of airline tickets, the price differences are mainly due to market fluctuation over time.

No. It's called Windows Home and Windows Professional.

How about a link to alternativeto.net? You may lose a user, but you will direct them somewhere legal.

This is accurate and the best option in my opinion