Why is Our Software Free?

Why Our Software is No-Cost and Contains No Advertising

Not all that long ago, if one wanted a piece of software, one went to a big-box or specialty store and shelled out some currency for a product based mostly on packaging or the recommendation of a sales person.

However this led to the problem of buyer’s remorse. Was the purchase of software a wise one? Does the software work as advertised? Since software has no return policy the purchase of said software is final.

Some developers will release a trial version of the product – with either limited functionality or the full version but with a limited time use. This however leads to extra work for the developer – essentially leading to multiple versions of software – the real product and the demo product. If the demo product is buggy or doesn’t work, why would a customer pay for the real product which does work but which the customer has no confidence?

Other developers take on a different approach and ignore the whole payment thing altogether – they embed advertising inside their products. The developer will then get paid by the advertiser based on predetermined criteria. The idea is that the developer then can offer the software at zero-cost to the end-user but still afford to develop software.

However in 2020, advertisers have gotten creepy with their tracking of user behavior. This also leads to the phenomenon of you are not the user but the product. This incentive leads to the temptation of the developer working to appease the one paying their bills – the advertiser – instead of working to create new products or improve existing ones.

We do not like the idea of doing additional work for no benefit. We also do not like the idea of cheating, manipulating or deceiving end users. The temptation to create a piece of software, even if it does not work, just to install some trojan or tracker is simply unethical.

In a world where there is open source software and large companies essentially giving away their programs, how can we realistically justify the headaches of charging for our little utilities? We do not like the idea of bad karma repercussions of inserting trackers or advertising in our software. We’d rather have good karma – lots of it. So that is why our software has no monetary cost to end users.

That being said, should you feel moved to DONATE as a way to increase your karma, you can use the Paypal button below. The Paypal page will show Software by Phil as the Payee. This is normal and expected.