New software pricing models are always worth looking out for. More and more cleanly defined things are sliding towards plain ol' data (not just media. Home fabbing and local, short run manufacture are turning home electricals and clothes into free data plus effort). And because the concept of commercial software is so new (only since Bill Gates invented software-as-property 30 years ago), its business models aren't as entrenched as, say, music, so it'll blaze the way in finding new ways to be sold. Also software has an inherent lightness, which means it's suitable as a testbed for ideas that'll eventually inform how businesses work around open hardware and other forms of data (though of course it won't be directly translated, just as the Web is a testbed for including social ideas in mobile phones and televisions without direct translation). Software pricing models are try-outs for the future, just like social software on the Web.
I ran across the Celtx script editing/collaboration application [thanks]. It's free, with the money coming from web services built into the interface.
This follows the model of applications like iPhoto, which has integrated photo book publishing, and of course iTunes with its music store. Linotype FontExplorer X follows the iTunes model but is more interesting in that it gives away superb font management software (something that used to be expensive) and, as its commercial play, bundles access to an online store font (and buying fonts was always somewhat tedious).
Until recently Eudora had a paid and ad-supported mode, and Twitterific can be used free of charge, supported by in-line advertising.
Celtx, though, seems to represent something newer than these, something much more mature, considered and integrated as a model:
But what a turnabout! Social software where the software's the commodity and the social comes at a premium!
Where Celtx differs from end-user webapps is that web applications haven't made a great showing with various levels of features for different levels of paying. Flickr offer stats to pro users (and bandwidth), and blogging software has had a tradition of pricing tiers (before Wordpress--who remembers Blogger Pro?), but these are exceptions: in the main webapps are (a) ad supported, and (b) networked: additional pay-for services are offered via non-exclusive affiliate links, with the end provider providing the functionality instead of integrating into the original webapp.
Authenticity and going with the grain:
There's something else that rings true about Celtx, and that's its authenticity. The internet has helped reduce the variable unit price of software close to zero (mod marketing and sales). In part due to improved SDKs, IDEs, and APIs, open source, and the sharing of knowledge on the internet, the barrier to entry and the cost of software development is astoundingly low. It's possible - I don't have figures to back this up - that the cost of developing (or licensing) a web front-end to manage sales, registration and lost licenses for a piece of software like Celtx would exceed its original development costs.
The authenticity comes in because they will charge for what actually costs money per unit, unlike the reproduction of software-as-data: collaboration necessarily involves servers, which somebody has to host, and that costs money. PDF generation involves expertise and money to install, host and scale. And so on.
On top of authenticity is a sense of going with the grain: whereas software is simple to pirate without hard-to-code countermeasures, the use of a service online is just not pirateable. This is the way physical property and consultancy has always been sold, of course - in non-pirateable forms - and paying only for the hard bit is not new. Two interesting twists elsewhere: CentOS is a free Linux distribution, built by the community from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's identical but free; with RHEL you pay for support. Perfect for the difference between development and production servers. And with Mint web stats, what you get for purchasing is the latest plug-ins and access to the forum.
So while I agree that the qualities a software pricing methodology must have are, as identified by ASG [pdf], budget predictability, controllability, technological independence, value, flexibility, and simplicity, I'd want to add to that those two above: authenticity (because that provides simplicity and a sense of fairness), and going with the grain (because it's easier, and automatically doesn't promote piracy).
Further questions:
For all this discussion, where do new software pricing models get us? There are a number of areas ripe for a further look.
As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.I'm inclined to agree! We already pay for our bandwidth separately, so what if we also paid for our computing resources independently from the webapp, and paid webapps for the service they offered rather than for their infrastructure?
My first job was at the Saturday boy in the local ironmongers and once, cleaning the top storage shelves, I found a price label that'd been there decades. Eric, my boss and one of the best men I have ever had the honour to meet, told me about the way products were priced when he was younger. The iron lawn roller he'd sold had the price cast into the body of the machine itself, because the price was as durable as the manufacturing process used to make it. It's not so simple now.