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Trialware/licensing strategies

Asked 2008-09-19T18:24:27.897
13

I wrote a utility for photographers that I plan to sell online pretty cheap ($10). I'd like to allow the user to try the software out for a week or so before asking for a license. Since this is a personal project and the software is not very expensive, I don't think that purchasing the services of professional licensing providers would be worth it and I'm rolling my own.

Currently, the application checks for a registry key that contains an encrypted string that either specifies when the trial expires or that they have a valid license. If the key is not present, a trial period key is created.

So all you would need to do to get another week for free is delete the registry key. I don't think many users would do that, especially when the app is only $10, but I'm curious if there's a better way to do this that is not onerous to the legitimate user. I write web apps normally and haven't dealt with this stuff before.

The app is in .NET 2.0, if that matters.

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2 Answers

11

There's not much point to doing complicated protection schemes. Basically one of two things will happen:

  1. Your app is not popular enough, and nobody cracks it.

  2. Your app becomes popular, someone cracks it and releases it, then anybody with zero knowledge can simply download that crack if they want to cheat you.

In the case of #1, it's not worth putting a lot of effort into the scheme, because you might make one or two extra people buy your app. In the case of #2, it's not worth putting a lot of effort because someone will crack it anyway, and the effort will be wasted.

Basically my suggestion is just do something simple, like you already are, and that's just as effective. People who don't want to cheat / steal from you will pay up, people who want to cheat you will do it regardless.

answered 2008-09-19T18:31:48.253
1

In these sort of circumstances, I don't really think it matters what you do. If you have some kind of protection it will stop 90% of your users. The other 10% - if they don't want to pay for your software they'll pretty much find a way around protection no matter what you do.

If you want something a little less obvious you can put a file in System32 that sounds like a system file that the application checks the existence of on launch. That can be a little harder to track down.

answered 2008-09-19T18:31:26.210

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