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CoatiSoftware / Sourcetrail

Sourcetrail - free and open-source interactive source explorer
https://www.sourcetrail.com/
GNU General Public License v3.0
14.95k stars 1.41k forks source link

Suggestions about promoting and financing Sourcetrail #834

Open vincent-hui opened 4 years ago

vincent-hui commented 4 years ago
  1. promote Sourcetrail in Qt Marketplace
  2. develop a better plugin than Qt Creator Plugin for communication with Sourcetrail. Perhaps integrating Sourcetrail into Qt Creator with Qt Creator plugin mechanism is a good idea and then sell the plugin at very low price in Qt Marketplace.
egraether commented 4 years ago

It's not worth the effort if you can only sell it for a very low price. How many developers use QtCreator? There are around 5 million C++ developers and 4% of those use QtCreator, so QtCreator has around 200 000 users.

How many of those will buy a Sourcetrail plugin, even though Sourcetrail is already free? How much would they be willing to spend? Would they pay annually?

vincent-hui commented 4 years ago

Qt Creator 11.64%

egraether commented 4 years ago

Ok, but still, how much revenue do you estimate from this?

vincent-hui commented 4 years ago

Assume you can earn 1 USD per user annually and assume 25% users will buy Sourcetrail plugin You can earn extra 5M x 0.1164 x 0.25 = 145.5k USD annually

egraether commented 4 years ago

I think you overestimate the willingness of developers to spend money on software (I once did too). Most software developers never spent a single dollar on developer tools and never will. In my experience around 0.1 - 2.5% will make a purchase, so by earning 1$ per user per year you could end up somewhere between 0.5k and 14.5k annually (assuming developers know about the tool already, which is another big problem).

mlangkabel commented 4 years ago

To be honest, for me it just feels to be out of proportion. If the whole Sourcetrail is free, why should the tiny QtCreator plugin suddenly be pay-to-win? Furthermore, it would just close the door between Sourcetrail and QtCreator for a lot of developers, while the doors between Sourcetrail and other tools still stay open. This does not feel right.