Good morning HN!<p>I've been developing (~5 months) a cross-platform (OSX, Win and Linux) desktop application, as an after-work-hobby-project, that is soon nearing alpha state.<p>Up until now I have mostly kept on coding since it's something I personally have a need for, and it's a fun project, but I also believe there is clique of other people that would find it useful as well. I would love to have other people use it, but I don't think there is enough of a business there to actually sell it, at least in its current form. [1]<p>I like the "hobbyish sharewarey business" of how Sublime Text started out, and I think my application cater to much of the same audience. But I feel I would not be able to give support or have time to go all in on this project at this stage, having a real job as well.<p>What are my options to distribute my software, even at an early stage (alpha/beta), without going full business and still be a at least a bit profitable?<p>Donation-ware? Patreon? Would love some data!<p>---<p>[1] There are other both big and small company alternatives, there are also some open source (imho shitty) alternatives. The closed source alternatives come in both subscription and one-time-license models. These alternatives also have much more features of course (but so does Visual Studio compared to Sublime Text I guess... :-) ).
Firstly, I hope for you that your project becomes popular enough so you can make money with it in theory.<p>When that happens, I would suggest going the way of Sublime Text: Unobtrusive, friendly reminders asking the user to purchase the software. From my own experience I know that it's difficult and extremely tedious to implement a copy protection scheme because it involves a whole lot of things you don't think of at first: how do you ensure that your license keys aren't posted on the internet? Does the customer need internet access to activate a key? What if the customer complains that the license key doesn't work? What about new versions of your software? Keep it simple.
I started by creating a free version of my Windows software and when it was more mature and had some traction, I added some more advanced features and stared charging.<p>Now it is a nice side income that helps me bootstrap my SaaS app :)