Selling applications on-line
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
I have always been selling registration codes, works perfectly for me. My reg. codes is kinda like a checksum of the users name or emailaddress. I use regnow.com, because they have a lot of features, I can write my own C code, which they put on their webserver, that generates the reg. codes from the users emailaddress. :) Regnow.com might be a bit expensive, but it's free to register with them, it's free to add new programs and their support is just great. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I live in Denmark, but I don't think there's many of my users that know that, and regnow.com just send a check in US$ every month :) - Anders Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
RegNow works OK for me. I'm selling registration codes; if you're going to use this method, make sure you're using some strong encryption like RSA. Tomasz Sowinski -- http://www.shooltz.com
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
I have been doing it since late 1996. I have always used registration codes. I use RegSoft for the US orders and RegisterHouse for the UK/EU orders. RegSoft particularly I recommend, they have never sent a late cheque in 4 years. They have just been bought by Digital River, but they have assured their customers that the current business model will stay. If you need any more info, dont hesitate to drop me a line or ask more questions here. Have fun, Shane
-
I have been doing it since late 1996. I have always used registration codes. I use RegSoft for the US orders and RegisterHouse for the UK/EU orders. RegSoft particularly I recommend, they have never sent a late cheque in 4 years. They have just been bought by Digital River, but they have assured their customers that the current business model will stay. If you need any more info, dont hesitate to drop me a line or ask more questions here. Have fun, Shane
-
Shane Like Michael I been meaning to do this for a long while now. Questions: a/ What encyption software do I use to generate keys? b/ Is it free? c/ You supplies the registration dialogs etc. Norm
OK, My current product has used the same general key (just a simple ascii hash) and has been very badly rorted with keygens. I am releasing the next product this week, and am using a 1024 Bit RSA digital signature. There will be no keygen for this, as long as the key remains secure. Keys/Auth codes all generated with OpenSSL (free). The dialogs are supplied by me. The most important things - 1. Never use a commercial lock. Timelock was a classic case, there was a cracked timelock.dll floating which rendered all TimeLock apps free to use. 2. Do research. Go to Fravia's page on Reverse Engineering. Learn to crack. I cracked the premier Help Author tool in 10 minutes using the right tools (Dont worry I never distributed it, or even used it past an evaluation). This tool costs $2500 AUS, they didnt put enough into it. If you are interested, I can post my RSA code, as it is tight even with source published. Shane
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
I use ShareIt for my stuff. They have been very easy to work with and trouble-free since sign-up. They have an SDK that allows you to use any sort of key generation algorithm that you want. just build them a DLL and they will use it; there are also some newer methods for key generation available. www.shareit.com. I use a registration code and key system. The only thing I did wrong with this is that I originally used a number hashed from the user's hard drive serial number - BIG MISTAKE. Use their name or something. The RSA approach seems wise; anything simpler will have hacks up within days.
-
I have always been selling registration codes, works perfectly for me. My reg. codes is kinda like a checksum of the users name or emailaddress. I use regnow.com, because they have a lot of features, I can write my own C code, which they put on their webserver, that generates the reg. codes from the users emailaddress. :) Regnow.com might be a bit expensive, but it's free to register with them, it's free to add new programs and their support is just great. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I live in Denmark, but I don't think there's many of my users that know that, and regnow.com just send a check in US$ every month :) - Anders Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
What do you use to generate your registration codes? Michael :-)
-
RegNow works OK for me. I'm selling registration codes; if you're going to use this method, make sure you're using some strong encryption like RSA. Tomasz Sowinski -- http://www.shooltz.com
Have you created your own registration generation code? Where would I start looking for writing something like this? Michael :)
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
You could also have a look at Softwrap. They provide a wizard which will wrap your app, and gives features such as limited tryouts, collect payments for you etc. All they take in return is a cut of the proceeds, and mail a cheque with the profits each month. Any price from $10 to $200 is handled by the wizard, anything greater than $200 requires negotiation. Once the app is wrapped, you can stick it anywhere, and all you have to do is wait for the moolah to come rolling in. Even Java programmers could follow the instructions. ;) Steve Even if you're not paranoid, they might still be watching you.
-
Have you created your own registration generation code? Where would I start looking for writing something like this? Michael :)
Yes, I did it myself. There are two things you should consider when creating registration code system: 1) how to protect against creating code generators 2) how to protect against patching 1 is easy - your code generation scheme must use some strong encryption; I've used RSA. I can't give you any good pointers on that, any encryption book worth its price should have enough info on RSA. 2 is, in my opinion, quite hard to achieve. Don't underestimate the amount of time crackers have - even sophisticated schemes obfuscating program flow (including commercial ones) get cracked. You simply have to release frequent updates - patches are created for specific binary. There used to be a cracking-related site at www.fravia.org, but it seems to be gone. It provided a good look at cracker mentality, tools, methods and even tips on making your code harder to crack. Tomasz Sowinski -- http://www.shooltz.com
-
OK, My current product has used the same general key (just a simple ascii hash) and has been very badly rorted with keygens. I am releasing the next product this week, and am using a 1024 Bit RSA digital signature. There will be no keygen for this, as long as the key remains secure. Keys/Auth codes all generated with OpenSSL (free). The dialogs are supplied by me. The most important things - 1. Never use a commercial lock. Timelock was a classic case, there was a cracked timelock.dll floating which rendered all TimeLock apps free to use. 2. Do research. Go to Fravia's page on Reverse Engineering. Learn to crack. I cracked the premier Help Author tool in 10 minutes using the right tools (Dont worry I never distributed it, or even used it past an evaluation). This tool costs $2500 AUS, they didnt put enough into it. If you are interested, I can post my RSA code, as it is tight even with source published. Shane
I do not have any shareware I have written, well that is good enough to be a commercial version :-) However, I would be interested in seeing your code and how to implement RSA for any future projects, but mostly for my own personal edification :-) If you don't mind. Sam C ---- Systems Manager Hospitality Marketing Associates
-
What do you use to generate your registration codes? Michael :-)
I use my own home-made stuff ;-) I have never seen any keygens for any of my applications, :) but I have seen several registration codes for them on the internet :( - Anders Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
-
OK, My current product has used the same general key (just a simple ascii hash) and has been very badly rorted with keygens. I am releasing the next product this week, and am using a 1024 Bit RSA digital signature. There will be no keygen for this, as long as the key remains secure. Keys/Auth codes all generated with OpenSSL (free). The dialogs are supplied by me. The most important things - 1. Never use a commercial lock. Timelock was a classic case, there was a cracked timelock.dll floating which rendered all TimeLock apps free to use. 2. Do research. Go to Fravia's page on Reverse Engineering. Learn to crack. I cracked the premier Help Author tool in 10 minutes using the right tools (Dont worry I never distributed it, or even used it past an evaluation). This tool costs $2500 AUS, they didnt put enough into it. If you are interested, I can post my RSA code, as it is tight even with source published. Shane
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
Hi Michael, we use Shareit.com as they have a presence in both the U.S. and in Germany. Were in Canada, our webserver is in Seattle Washington. We chose ShareIT because they have all the standard features of the others, but are a bit more sensitive to the worldwide nature of software sales, not just the U.S. for example their purchase page can be viewed in several languages and they can process in both Euro's and U.S. dollars which the purchaser can choose from whatever country they are purchasing from. Were quite happy with them, they as well offer the option of uploading your reg key generator although we do it ourselves here because ours is a little complex as we sell a lot of Add-On licenses in addition to new ones (our app is lan based) And also, I don't know if others support this, but we can specify countries we do not sell to (because of U.S. export restrictions we inherited with some API's we use) and we can also specify a location to collect sales tax from. The biggest thing we've found is fast response time to inquiries results in better sales. Our policy is to respond to all questions within 15 minutes of receipt via email. We can't offer telephone support because we have sales in so many countries worldwide that we would need 24hr phone support which is beyond our means right now. The other very important factor is getting registered with search engines early because it takes quite a while for hits to ramp up. The choice of page design and keywords is 100% critical. If you don't focus on that you might as well not bother. We also have our app hosted by Tucows.com because they offer a free review (we got 5 cows! :) )and because they actually host the software worldwide so that it can be downloaded from a close server which is important for worldwide sales of larger applications. Ours is 23mb and people in Australia (for example) have very poor connection speeds in general to our Seattle based server so with Tucows they can download from a local mirror. If you are considering submitting an application to tucows be certain it has an installer/uninstaller, context sensitive help and is very easy to use, test it out on a bunch of people first and fix *anything* that is unclear or confusing. If your app has any potential to be sold worldwide you should carefully consider multi byte character sets, keeping all text displayed in your program in a string table and all other localization issues with dates and numbers if applicable because it's one hell of a big job in a large applic
-
Shane Like Michael I been meaning to do this for a long while now. Questions: a/ What encyption software do I use to generate keys? b/ Is it free? c/ You supplies the registration dialogs etc. Norm
Hi Norm, we use the public domain TwoFish encryption algorithm. Take a look at the following site for links to the Cryto++ library. It's probably the most comprehensive and easiest to use with a sample of just about every crypto algorithm in existence. You can add it to your own projects quickly and easily. http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/cryptlib.html There is absolutely no way you can protect your program from determined crackers, however you can learn a lot about what *not* to do by actively seeking out their websites and learning how they do it. There is no better source of information on how to design a keycode system than that anywhere. Ground Zero Tech-Works http://www.ayanova.com
-
At the moment I make my living as a software consultant/contract developer. Between contracts I have been working on some Windows applications with the intention of trying to make a little extra money. I've been investigating selling stuff on-line and would like to hear about the experiences of others. I'm UK based which shouldn't really make much difference in this internet age. I've had a look at what some of CodeProject's advertisers use to sell their wares. RegNow.com seems popular, and I've also seen authorize.net and kagi.com used. Anybody know of any others I can look at. I'm not talking about selling vast quantities of stuff and the apps will be within the £20 - £100 price range. What is the best way to sell the apps, sell a registration code or sell access to a ftp site? Michael :-)
Check out this site: http://www.blackcatsystems.com/regservices It has a list of around 15 registration services like regnow and has a comparison chart. As far as the best way to sell apps, I would recommend registration code. However, if your app becomes popular enough, you are likely to lose money due to crackers. Why can't they use their skills for good rather damaging others? As far as I know almost every program can be cracked, no matter how secure it is. Softice along is the only tool hackers need to view the entire asm code of the program and how it works and therefore patch it and modify the CRC or checksum scheme or other protections. Good Luck. Eric :)