Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

re: Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

Peter Schmitz — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 12:41:43 GMT

I for one would at the very least be interested to see what you can offer :)

We're currently working on setting up a community site, based on The BeerHouse. It offers forums, but they suck.

I pondered on coding more fucntionality myself, or with the help of several peers from the userbase of the TBH book, but since I want somethign out quickly, and the userbase is used to vBulletin, I'm kind of between a rock and a hard place.

I just downloaded HnD (thanks Frans), and will also see if I can combine vBulleting and integrate it into the existing C# website (the point of the site is mostly to offer a single signin for loads of functionality that is now spread over numerous websites). An extra option would not hurt :)

Peter

re: Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

FransBouma — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:45:20 GMT

Creating a product takes twice the time it took to create the stuff to sell. This means: your forum package for example took 1 year, then you have 1 year to polish everything, write docs, write a website to sell it, setup a store, setup support stuff etc. etc. Do not underestimate the amount of work you have to do to get from a piece of software that works to a piece of software that's polished to be a product.

I've done it a couple of times, it just takes twice the time of writing the software.

That said, the question then is: should you ask money for the work you've done? As it's a forum system: I wouldn't bother. The market is simply already divided up. People buying a forum system don't care what framework/platform it runs on, they want a forum. You can't compete with marketshare and features and maturity of forums like phpBB and vBulletin.

I released our forum system / support system as GPL last year ('HnD', which is asp.net based) as a case study/example. So it's free, and even then the # of people downloading it each day is below 100. Ok, we didn't market it but then again, if marketing requires you to get a marketshare, it will cost you alot of money in this already crowded market, so I'm not so sure if this will be a successful product. (sorry, but I'm trying to be realistic here. It's your money, so if I give you advice like "Sure! do it, man!", and you lose money because it was obvious it would get tough, I'd do the wrong thing in this case IMHO).

Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

DotNetKicks.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 06:02:09 GMT

You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

re: Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

Yuriy — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:06:09 GMT

In my projects I prefer to make very few dependecies on third party components if any. And if we use anything, it should be from big and long living vendors.

Many people will buy what you sell, however.

re: Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

Jeff — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:57:05 GMT

That's totally the world that I came from. People ask me all the time why I didn't use an existing forum app, and it was always because they didn't do what I needed. The logic would be that others would feel similar about mine, which is why I stopped charging for it.

Although, I'm still blown away by the success of vBulletin. Granted, it seems mostly used by people who have little more than a forum.

re: Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?

The Other Steve — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:44:44 GMT

Giving it away, yet licensing it would be sort of like Community Server, right?

It always seemed to me that the money on web apps is to be made hosting the site, not selling the software. Generally it's pretty difficult for the layman to setup a website from a pile of files, and a SQL connection string.

That's an interesting question. I'm working on something of my own, which basically evolved from a... "I'm not happy with the way others are doing this." I haven't gotten very far, but I had debated giving the code away. I really just want to do this to setup a website idea of mine. But I was debating if I should start hosting at codeplex for the experience.