> The calculator assumes that there's no cost to integrating with your system.
Thanks for the feedback! And that’s correct, but I think you misunderstand the calculator. This is for the cost of the licensing server alone, not the integration into a software application, which will of course cost additional time/money either way. Regardless, the real build vs buy savings in almost any third-party are in often forgotten long-term maintenance costs.
> It also assumes that the developer is salaried, which is almost never the case when it's a single-person shop.
If you don’t have a salaried developer, or at least have an average spend per-year to be able to input (even if it’s yourself at an hourly rate), then you likely aren’t my target market. And that’s totally fine. One-person shops like to unnecessarily build things in-house because they typically value their time at near-zero. They’ll spend weeks building something they could have paid $19/mo for. (Which is fine -- they churn more often and require more support, in my experience.)
> The amount of effort required to learn your system, to do the integration, to test and to support it is absolutely on par with the time it would take to make a simple licensing framework from scratch.
Keyword here would be “simple.” In my experience from running the business for nearly 6 years, most licensing systems aren’t simple. And if they are, they likely don’t even need a licensing server in the first place -- just do signed license keys.
I have testimonial after testimonial of the opposite conclusion -- that the API saved significant time and money -- especially for the long tail, years after integration.
Unless your licensing system is incredibly simple (and in my experience they rarely are), there’s money to be saved in not building and maintaining it in-house.
Thanks for the feedback! And that’s correct, but I think you misunderstand the calculator. This is for the cost of the licensing server alone, not the integration into a software application, which will of course cost additional time/money either way. Regardless, the real build vs buy savings in almost any third-party are in often forgotten long-term maintenance costs.
> It also assumes that the developer is salaried, which is almost never the case when it's a single-person shop.
If you don’t have a salaried developer, or at least have an average spend per-year to be able to input (even if it’s yourself at an hourly rate), then you likely aren’t my target market. And that’s totally fine. One-person shops like to unnecessarily build things in-house because they typically value their time at near-zero. They’ll spend weeks building something they could have paid $19/mo for. (Which is fine -- they churn more often and require more support, in my experience.)
> The amount of effort required to learn your system, to do the integration, to test and to support it is absolutely on par with the time it would take to make a simple licensing framework from scratch.
Keyword here would be “simple.” In my experience from running the business for nearly 6 years, most licensing systems aren’t simple. And if they are, they likely don’t even need a licensing server in the first place -- just do signed license keys.
I have testimonial after testimonial of the opposite conclusion -- that the API saved significant time and money -- especially for the long tail, years after integration.
Unless your licensing system is incredibly simple (and in my experience they rarely are), there’s money to be saved in not building and maintaining it in-house.