XYplorer Beta Club

Your idea of 1 lic all machines is great,but being generous in lic may make the
person who had purchased the license to share(the serial) with their friends and
make u bereft of money,by making it pirated.
I may be wrong at now,because u may have surplus amount of money now,
but in the future if ur earnings are less then....(will this generosity...)

Kind regards.

No worries, mankind is growing like mad. There are more babies than software pirates.

Well, I don't think this is any more a free ticket to XY than all the keygen soft out there already offer.
And, if Don isn't worried about it me thinks we shouldn't either, but we can help by making sure that our keys are only used according to the licensing terms.

RalphM wrote:Well, I don't think this is any more a free ticket to XY than all the keygen soft out there already offer.
And, if Don isn't worried about it me thinks we shouldn't either, but we can help by making sure that our keys are only used according to the licensing terms.

Fully agree! If you search for XY on Twitter, almost all the results are for warez so if a registered user lets a friend use his key, at least Don got one sale whereas those using keygen/warez likely never even know anyone who paid.

And I think that paying users aren't likely to share keys since they know how much effort Don puts into XY.

Here is how I see it: Crack users are my foot soldiers. Because: I believe most of them are children that don't have money anyway, or if they have they will never spend it on software. But they grow up, and some of them will become employed in a software company. And take XY with them. And the company will pay for it. I call it "crackal marketing".

Hi

I'm one of your newest foot soldiers. I just found Xyplorer a few days ago, and if it continues to impress me, I will continue to use it. But not for $70.

I think your program is great, but it costs way too much. I only paid $90 for Windows 7 Home Premium, and you want $70 for a utility that improves one tiny piece of it.

There are dozens of things that can be improved in Windows. If I have to pay $70 for each one, it will cost me thousands of dollars.

Like I said, your program is great, but it's not essential. There is nothing I can do with it that I can't do without it, and there are freeware alternatives that are almost as good. I've been using Free Commander for a while, and the only reason I looked for anything else is because it doesn't do unicode. Doing unicode is not worth $70 when I can just use regular Windows explorer for the two minutes a day I need it.

And there are freeware programs that ARE essential, and even better. Visual Studio Express comes to mind. You can't write programs without it( or something like it), and it's really, really, good, and it's free.

If you charged, say, ten dollars for your program, you would have millions of customers, and you would be rich. You would be so rich that you could easily afford to refund the money that your old customers gave you.

If you continue to charge $70, you may or may not have a few thousand customers, and you may or may not be able to make a living from it.

What I WILL do if I continue to use it is give you publicity everywhere I can. I frequent a lot of discussion boards, and I'll be happy to tell everybody how good your program is.

But you really do need to lower your price. Not to help me, but to help yourself.

chubbyw wrote:Doing unicode is not worth $70 when I can just use regular Windows explorer for the two minutes a day I need it.

I think the two minute part is the main reason why XY is too expensive for you, and I can fully understand that. In my opinion the people who buy XY (or TC or DO) are those who use a file manager as an essential tool all day long.

For two minutes of use it's merely a small convenience, but if you use it for hours every day the small differences add up to something significant.

Personally I think Don is doing the right thing with the license keys at the moment. The sad fact is no amount of fancy protection is going to keep people from pirating a piece of software. The only thing you achieve is to annoy and inconvenience your actual customers, spending a lot of money in the process. Embracing the group of users who are not going to spend money on your software anyway as a means of free advertising or 'foot soldiers' is, I think, much better.

One of the reasons I bought a license for XY was that it was portable without requiring me to go through hoops to get it to work on my USB stick like some of the others.

chubbyw wrote:I'm one of your newest foot soldiers. I just found Xyplorer a few days ago, and if it continues to impress me, I will continue to use it. But not for $70.

I think your program is great, but it costs way too much. I only paid $90 for Windows 7 Home Premium, and you want $70 for a utility that improves one tiny piece of it.

Hi and welcome to the XY forums!
I'm not the author Don, who may respond differently, but here's my thoughts on this:
You may think it costs too much but for us XY fans, we think it's well worth it! Given the amount of time and personal attention here that he gives, which you don't get from other software, it's cheap at that price! And...XY is available in two other variants that are only $43 but with limitations obviously...plus, on occasion, Don has a special pricing or sale and you can get it then for less.

You said you paid $90 for W7 HP...I looked and the current price for the matching W7 HP edition is $180...because you can't fairly compare XY to a W7 OEM or Upgrade vers since those requirements don't apply here and that's an OS so a fair compare would be to the other two leading FM's which are x2 ($50 for lifetime) and DO ($87 for minimum licence which is MUCH more limited than XY licence) and those average out to $70 which is where XY is at.

Like I said, your program is great, but it's not essential. There is nothing I can do with it that I can't do without it, and there are freeware alternatives that are almost as good. I've been using Free Commander for a while, and the only reason I looked for anything else is because it doesn't do unicode.

Some us consider XY essential and there isn't another free product that will suffice...and when was the last FC update? Seems like 6 mths ago...the latest official update to XY was in last few weeks and beta just a day ago... and where's the support for FC? Not as prompt as here, I'm sure.

If you charged, say, ten dollars for your program, you would have millions of customers, and you would be rich. You would be so rich that you could easily afford to refund the money that your old customers gave you.

If you continue to charge $70, you may or may not have a few thousand customers, and you may or may not be able to make a living from it.

There is NO way that Don would ever charge that little for all the work he puts into XY because he's knows that there is a limited nbr of users who are potential customers and they are willing to pay for a quality program AND the support...I really doubt that even the free FM's have that many users so when you have a smaller customer market, you charge more...that's just good business.

What I WILL do if I continue to use it is give you publicity everywhere I can. I frequent a lot of discussion boards, and I'll be happy to tell everybody how good your program is.

But you really do need to lower your price. Not to help me, but to help yourself.

I do hope you give XY positive publicity but I'm sure that Don won't lower the price (except for special sales) because he knows what his efforts are worth and so do we.

Yes.

Additionally:
1) $70 buys you not only the product you like but the whole future of the product: it's the lifetime license. The standard license is just US$ 42.95.
2) Don't forget the exchange rates which are responsible for the relatively high US Dollar price. US$ 42.95 corresponds to € 29.95 which is not much in Germany (where I happen to live and have to pay the rent).

Don,

Your comment about 'crackal marketing' is absolutely correct. I also wouldn't be concerned about it at all for exactly the same reasons you mention

I've had very similar experiences . . . A few years ago I used to work for a commercial training company specialising it training presentations, video's, CD's and DVD's which were sold to complement the training courses we offered (nothing to do with computer work, by the way)

Anyway, we noticed that many of the products we sold were available on file sharing services such as Rapidshare, Hotfile and all the rest of the torrent sites. We were completely in panic. All the work we'd done, thousands of hours (I wrote all the material personally) just seemed to have gone to waste. Worse, there was nothing we could do about it . . . you take one down and ten more appear

We were really upset for about 6 months when we realised that we hadn't noticed that the number of actual sales had increased, and the number of bookings for our courses had almost trippled. Wow, this was strange

We did a little research with those attending our courses and asked them to be honest . . . the majority of them had seen parts of our presentations after downloading them, some even had the full thing but still paid to come and see us

It's true . . . crack users create customers. The music industry has seen similar results in certain areas. I read recently that 'Alice in Wonderland 2010' sold as many as it did because people had downloaded it, liked it, then decided to buy the real version. It seems the pirated versions were used by many just to see what it was like

Good attitude

Biggynuff wrote:Your comment about 'crackal marketing' is absolutely correct. I also wouldn't be concerned about it at all for exactly the same reasons you mention.
...

Thank you. Good read!

Thanks Don,

One thing I forgot to mention . . . we started a positive policy of giving things away. Sound strange, but we sold a book of training diagrams and information for something like $15. We sold a few hundred in the first year and no doubt could have continued the same. It was one of many products we had. We then started giving this away as a free download 'just to help our loyal customers'. Ok, we lost the money earned from the book, but the number of full courses we sold (over $1000) went up considerably. People who downloaded the free book realised that they really wanted what we offered. In business, it sometimes still surprises me what works. If ever I go into such a business again the first thing I'll do is give away a big chunk of what I produce. I've seen the results

(p.s. I'm NOT suggesting that you give XY away!! . It's a different ball game, but the crack people do that for you anyway)

chubbyw: Hope that you've seen this offer which I'll repeat here:
http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6258

admin wrote:You should know it first and from me:

On Friday, April 8th 2011, the XYplorer Lifetime License Pro will be available on BitsDuJour for less than half the regular price (51% discount)!

In case you have friends, let them know.

Don