Hi Michael :)

i am aware that Sketchup wasn't always free until Google acquired it, but my point was - how many people had heard of Sketchup until they made the "lite" version free for all? their original intent of making it free to drive the creation of content had the side effect of becoming widely used by amateurs and hobbyists, which in turn causes an increase in sales for their PRO version. i fully understand your situation and i can appreciate the work you put into this great program. this was just a suggestion for you to consider to help MOI get a wider audience. like i said, i had only heard about MOI about a week ago and i only learned about it from a blog where is was only mentioned in passing. i've started telling my hobbyist friends about MOI, but the high price (compared to ~$50 USD or free) puts it out of their price range for a "hobby" purchase. i would highly encourage a "lite" version to get it into more hands. i personally plan on purchasing the full version for what i do with prototype creation in my home business.

it's just my opinion, take it as you please ;)

Hi Klingbeil, Eventually the free SketchUp version probably did increase sales of their Pro version, but not initially. If you talk to some SketchUp resellers you will probably find that the free version initially caused Pro sales to plummet - for a lot of work the free SketchUp version does everything that is needed, and it's easy for something like an architecture office to have something like 10 people using the free version to do regular stuff and only a couple of people need the Pro version. So at first that shift to a free version actually caused a big negative impact on the Pro version. Google has such deep pockets that they didn't really care about that, and they can afford to do things like wait out a few years for the situation to change.

But for someone in my position being just a single person company instead of a huge mega billion dollar company things are much different.


> i would highly encourage a "lite" version to get it into more hands.

Yeah, like I mentioned I think I would like to do this eventually.

But it would require additional overhead to try and branch out a "lite" version too early since it would involve maintaining active development in multiple product branches. Since I'm a single person developing MoI it's important for me to keep development overhead to a minimum right now.

So branching out a "lite" version won't really be feasible for me until some point in the future when everything that I would expect to need to go into the lite version is already completely covered in the current regular version. That might be sometime around the MoI v4 timeframe I would guess.


But also just in general a high volume / low cost per copy type thing is not really a particularly big focus for me because like I described earlier that carries a huge support burden along with it.

As compared to most of the rest of the big CAD industry as a whole, the current $295 price tag for MoI is actually extremely inexpensive and affordable already - price tags more in the $4000 range are pretty common...

MoI offers an inexpensive and also easier to use alternative to that kind of stuff.


I don't think that I would really target something so low as $50, though - I mean MoI is fundamentally designed as a productivity application that lets you accomplish some pretty advanced types of things that would otherwise be difficult to do. It's not really in the category of something like a pure entertainment app like a game, that's more what I would think would belong at that $50 price point that you mention.

I mean fundamentally MoI is intended to help you get some cool stuff made and help you get work done. For a lot of people the value of that is clearly above the current already low price tag.


- Michael

Hello,

The fact that MoI is low three figures in a field of four and five five figure software is one indicator of it's value proposition. A zero price on a product will not bring in the right type of customers, the paying kind, it just doesn't work that way. Sketchup could go away tomorrow and it wouldn't matter to Googles bottom line. I would guess MoI sales account for a much larger percentage of gross revenue for Triple Squid than Sketchup for Google.

I'd also like to point out that, even though, Google has very deep pockets they still made some changes to the free version's import capabilities removing DWG/DXF import in order IMO to strongly influence a move to the paid version for the professional users. Free or very low cost can devalue a product. While I really haven't much money I still don't like to see small companies going out of business due to products priced too low. MOI is already several hundred dollars cheaper than its peers. And frankly as I travel around the WWW I notice that MOI is more than popular enough with the crowd that doesn't pay for software. Exposure isn't the problem.
Al