Is this coupon code promotional technique spammy?

Discussions
#21

Your goals is really only to keep the honest folks honest. There’s tons of hacked versions of HelpSpot out there and key generators.

I never give those any consideration. You probably could do nothing, just charge what you want and ignore the few people who have the skills and desire to hack it. HelpSpot is encoded with Ioncube which is another option. I do it primarily to avoid modifications by IT which later make the product unable to be properly upgraded, it also helps keep the honest people honest though as I said there’s plenty of ways for them to not be anyway.

For HelpSpot’s market it’s not an issue though, the majority of customers are larger orgs that jump through way more hoops than installing ioncube to install most things. We also have a hosting partner so people who don’t want to bother with anything just use that.

The main thing here is stolen versions generally cost you little or nothing, but supporting those stolen versions cost you a lot. So you want to make sure you have a customer database and probably that it’s hooked in with your help desk app (see what I did here) to make sure you’re not supporting people who are on stolen (or expired) support.

#22

To echo @ian’s and @rachelandrew’s comments, you probably don’t have to worry about a technical solution to the user licensing question as much as you think you need to worry about it. :slight_smile: There’s no code for limiting users or domains in my SaaS Rails Kit, and the code is completely open once you download it. I simply have some text at the beginning of the license file asking people to be honest. There have been a couple of instances of dishonesty that I know about, but most people will do the right thing.

#23

Ooooooh. That’s an excellent point.

#24

@Christopher You’re right. A popup is definitely not the way to go. I’ll need to think of something less intrusive.

@rachelandrew @ian @stympy Sounds like I shouldn’t devote too much energy trying to prevent people from stealing, which makes sense. I used to spend a lot of time trying to combat piracy of my codecanyon products but it didn’t have any effect on my revenue.

I’m sold on the idea of a new pricing scheme, probably user based. It’s exciting and scary; I always get a little nervous when I raise my prices.