by ylluminate » Tue Jul 04, 2017 3:05 pm
Well I'm thinking that a Patreon style method would be more appropriate where perhaps the software itself is has a more nominal price tag, but then a higher level would give "votes" and / or input towards other features. Perhaps even a free version as well that has the source released after X months or such as well. Just brainstorming.
But as far as pricing goes, a subscription of $5-10 might be doable, but more likely if monthly the tolerance will be on the lower end. For a one time cost, perhaps $20-50 depending on just how useful it is. It might even be more if it highly caters to servers and admins very pointedly. Especially if it has some monitoring capabilities and perhaps even submission back to the dev team(s) for analysis of issues, etc. for preemptive work and tuning.
One thing that is always true and we've learned from the iTunes and app stores is that people can tolerate relatively low amounts of monthly drain on their wallet for something useful. I don't know how to reach the "masses" with this, but a $0.99 to $1.99 monthly drain would be more than tolerable if we can find something that would be appealing enough at this price point.
You'd think that with data integrity and core operating system functionality that it would be much more "worth" the cost to people, but for some reason (I've found the hard way) people seem to be more willing to open their wallets to entertainment than actually useful things. Backup itself has finally become a tolerable acceptance after enough marketing and years of beating the data-loss drum, so perhaps that might be a vector... For example, could it be feasible to create, as part of this solution, a ZFS -> Backblaze or Amazon Glacier backup such that snapshots are stored in the cloud via a handy conduit with ZFS Pro?...