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Ask HN: How to sell a framework if there are free alternatives?

7 points by asznajder ↗ HN
The company in which I work has a very good OR Mapping framework which significantly reduces the time to write all DAO, DTO etc. What is more it automatically makes changes in code when you change your data model. You simply don't have to waste your time on refactoring. It has very friendly API, good documentation, full support etc. The product was used in many e-commerce platforms which we developed world-wide. It's tested, trusty and in my opinion far easier to use and maintain than Hibernate or iBatis. This is why my company wants to make it available to other programmers - unfortunatelly not for free. As you probably think it's not a stunner. This is why I wonder if there really is no place for such product? How would you try to sell something like thIS? What are your expectations from a product which has many free alternatives?

8 comments

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YoAdrian
You might try asking this on http://stackoverflow.com/, but you'd be surprised in how many companies would go for a paid product over open source. The main reason, so they can "choke someone when it all goes to hell" (to quote a coworker).
jaytaylor
Why not open-source it? I'm sure your company has benefitted from OSS, it'd be nice to give a little back. Not to mention the positive PR buzz you could generate.
dragonwriter
The challenge with selling such a product when free (especially open source, not just free-of-charge) alternatives exists is convincing potential users that the performance/productivity advantages it has over the alternatives now and the support commitment you are making for it outweigh the freedom that comes with freely-licensed software and the risk that comes with reliance on proprietary technology that may be abandoned by the vendor (in which case it is not only unsupported, but potentially unsupportable) compared to open-source alternatives.

Its certainly possible to make that case, but it can be challenging.

rartichoke
As soon as you start charging for it you will need to offer top notch support. Supporting it might cost more than you make from selling it.
HeyLaughingBoy
How to sell it? The same way you sell anything. Understand your market: not everyone wants free and sometimes "free" is an impediment.

Many businesses do not allow the use of OSS in their product for any number of reasons. They are your potential customers.

bwh2
You could make the download and docs public, but require licensing for commercial projects, ala HighCharts (your pricing model may differ).
vineet
I think your audience will likely be thinking: I believe you that your framework is better than Hibernate, but is it so much better that it will be worth my time to download it? to set it up? to learn how to use it? to train the entire team to use it? to get their questions answered when they have a problem?

The above is a high bar to hit - even if it is free. And if you charge, you have a bigger challenge.

If you are building a framework for the Java community, I think that your answer is to make a large part (that is significantly better than Hibernate) open source. Once you do that, and see the community forming around it, then you should think about monetizing it. Likely by selling support, services, premium connectors, monitoring tools.

While I would be willing to believe that you guys have an amazing product, I am still extremely skeptical in believing that you will be able to build a business around it. So think MVP without investing too much into it. And right now, MVP sounds like: make it open source.

You might want to see how the Vaadin guys make money.