This has been on my radar for a while. It's so impressive. Bundling electron for all platforms can be a real headache.
The only issue is, it's hard to commit $99/mo for a solo developer to trial a small app. (I know it's pennies for businesses)
The only issue is, it's hard to commit $99/mo for a solo developer to trial a small app. (I know it's pennies for businesses)
I'm asking because my firm makes a competitor to ToDesktop (sort of) [1], and this is a question we often get. It's free for open source apps and cheaper than ToDesktop, but the "I just want to trial an idea and not spend any money on it" use case isn't well supported by this pricing model.
One possibility is a trial period, but then how long should it be? Alternatively some mechanism that limits the number of installs, and which therefore has a lower price point attached.
However it seems a bit pointless because signing certificates cost on the order of hundreds of dollars a year anyway, and then file hosting also adds cost. So if you aren't willing to commit on the order of that much up front, then it may be a lost cause. To drive costs lower you need to take signing out of the equation entirely, which means someone else signs and sandboxes the resulting code.
A dev team can click the "Run Untrusted Program" button, and it serves as an incentive to upgrade before distributing.
Then there's the question of how long a trial would last. It could take months until someone decides whether their app is going to fly or not.
If I were trialing your service, it'd be to figure out how it works into my dev process and the decision to purchase would come before I'm sending executable out to anyone but my dev team.
At that point, it's locked in to an extent - I'm not going to want to tell my users "Actually, don't update the app using the automatic updater, go download a new exe instead and use the automatic updater on that one from now on." since that kind of friction can cost a lot of users.
Now, what if you want to distribute within your team? Well, then your compadres would need to run a localhost server too if they want to see updates working. But that's probably OK.
This lets you run the purchasing process in parallel with getting it set up if your company is slow to authorize payments (the tool will give you a payment link you can send to anyone).
From my view, as a solo dev with a lot of small clients and personal projects, I start a lot of projects that make their way into the hands of collaborators but never make it to a project that's ready to finish. I would loathe to pay that kind of price for those.
But if I'm at the point where I have beta testers and other kinds of non-client/dev personnel, I'm a lot more ready to put down significant cash for dev tooling.