Well... that's complicated.
As a programmer I can say that:
If development should speed up - the only way is to develop on full-time basis. It is impossible to work for 8h/day in some "normal" work and at the same time develop after work - because there are other important things in life, family commitments etc. And also because you will burn out. I tried that for hundred times and it never worked out. It's maybe good for some short sprints but bad for any longer projects.
To be able to develop as full-time job, monthly income need to be stable and high enough to let you quit normal job. And it is easy to get stable financing for projects with a lot of users, but it's hard to get that for dedicated projects, DVB player is a project targeted to a small group of users, with DVB cards. And has got many competitors - paid and free ones.
If monthly subscription fee will be too high - it will be hard to find anybody interested to pay, but if it will be too low - even a lot of supporters won't give stable monthly income.
Let's take for example a 5$ subscription. For example my monthly living costs are ~1000$, but in different parts of the world it can be higher. Anyway if I would be a developer - I would need ~200-250 subscribers to be able to move on to full-time development. Subscribers count should be higher, because subscribers can leave at any time, for example unhappy with direrction of development.
There is additional problem which I mentioned above - sometime subscribers can be unhappy of direction and can stop to pay. For example amatorul would like to see foufou3 user interface changes. But for me these were not interesting and probably if that would be main development direction - I would stop to pay. And that's the catch - not always everybody can be happy with development direction and it's impossible to make everybody happy.
Also another issue is that if there would be monthly fee - supporters would expect that every month (or more often) there would be any release with some new possibilities. If you won't be able to speed up development in this way, probably subscribers base will get smaller.
Monthly fee also need to be well calculated. For example with 10$ - after a year cost for user is 120$. That's pretty high and for that money it is possible to buy lifetime licence for nearly any other DVB player and even for some professional tools like TSReader. Of course that's your decision how you will measure the price for monthly fee, because it's something more that just development - it's a lot of heart and devition poured into this project. If you would set fee even to 1000$ - it's your right and I fully respect that. But of course you will probably get none subscribers.
Another tricky issue with monthly subscription is... how to treat subscribers then they will stop to pay. It seems to be logical that when user will stop to pay - DVB Dream should stop to work. But if somebody was a supporter for a whole year - he paid 60$ or 120$, that's a high price. If after a year of supporting user will got nothing, that will additionally cut subscribers base: user will ask himself - why I should pay, if at the end I can get nothing? Of course you and I understand that paying is for one month usage and user in fact had what he paid for. But from user point of view that deal is the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever
But if you would like to change that and for example give an ability for user to stay with last paid version of DVB Dream... that would be also unfair for long time supporters, because somebody can pay every month and get latest updates and other user will pay once a year and get all updates from the whole year for 5$ instead of 60$, the only difference will be that 5$ user will get updates not as instant.
And there is another catch related to what I have written above. A sad one. Some time ago one of my friends has passed away. He was a developer of shareware app, very useful one. After he deceased, his websites went down, app stopped to work even for users who bought app, because app was unable to check is it licenced or not.
We won't live forever. There should be some way to let app live after we will stop to develop it for any reason. Especially when it is based on subscription fee, because users even after many years of support can left with nothing.
I will respect any your decision. And as an user I would accept fee up to 5$. Maybe eventually higher if there would be discounts for payment for a whole year? Not sure yet, I would need to see a final offer.
The saddest thing is that unfortunately in my whole dev carrier I saw no good idea for maintaining dedicated projects for small, targeted user base.
Already tried or saw results of:
- Shareware with lifetime licences
- Shareware with limited time licences (one year or to next major release with bigger changes, minor upgrades were free)
- Shareware with different levels of support and/or features set
- Adware (that was the worst idea I've ever had, no control over ads, users were mad as hell, that triggered a lot of security and privacy concerns)
- Subscription
- Freeware + Donations (donors: dedicated support with access to issues reporting system, Mantis and ability to see progress of bugfixing and addition of new features)
None of these ever worked out for me. Always income was low and often additionally - irregular. Pressure from users also wasn't helping at all - they paid and they wanted features, it's hard to say 'no' to them.
I've finally opensourced smaller projects, move one to freeware and ceased development of bigger ones (in my uderstanding DVB Dream would be a bigger one).
Not very optimistic post. Sorry to say that. Hope you will find a better way. But also I'm pretty much sure that as a developer you already know that. If there is now not many licenced users, I'm afraid that there will be not many subscribers as well. And that's the main issue here.
Please do not cease DVB Dream development, you can always try to search and explore different ways and always - if some idea won't be right - go one step back and try to something different, other approach.
Maybe try to do some experiment - keep shareware version for now, but do not update it too frequently and start subscription based version for some time with regular updates? And we will see what will happen?
