Grandpi,

Michael is much nicer than I would be. You should be embarrassed by this request. How do you expect a one man operation to just give away all his hard work and thousands of hours of r&d? MoI3d is a brilliant package which is way underpriced and I don't think you can find better product support. If you don't feel compelled to help support MoI3d maybe you should just stick with sketchup. I really don't understand the mentality of people who can so easily diminish the value of talent and hard work.

Hi. I do not know why people think Sketchup is free. They havent read the license agreement. SKetchup is NOT FREE product for commercial use. I dont think those people use that just for fun. And comparing Sketchup with Moi is not applicable at all. Sketchup cannot handle NURBS and Moi has not got some of those powerful feature which Skp has as well as Moi is still young compared to matured Skp. So If someone likes Skp. use that If someone likes Moi use. but Skp. users will never create accurate geometries on the basis of facet 3d engine.

I believe that Sketchup community knows Moi : I have made some regular publicity on it forum! :D
(near 100 000 members at http://forums.sketchucation.com/ ;)

I agree with Michael's comments.

IMHO, if the trial version does not convert a prospect into a customer, then why would a limited free version convert someone into a customer?

Only the largest companies can afford to provide fee support for free software. If a lite version of MoI were given out freely, the users would be on their own. Without "factory support", many would become frustrated (who reads the manual?) and MoI would get a bad name. This is a counter-productive strategy.

Better to let people try it, and if they see the value, become customers who benefit from the free support. MoI is not expensive, especially spread over the time period in which you plan to benefit from it. From my personal experience, it's best to skip the freebies and jump straight to the software that you know is going to get the job done. Learning curves cost time and money - I'd rather do it once than twice.

Ed

Hi all.
Thank you Michael for your reply, i understand.
My question was to find new way of meeting new users following replies i had on the forum with a lite version ... and not to forget to pay for MOI standard package ... i understand very well work hours spent to make this piece of software a reality...

At $295, and with that level of support, MOI is a bargain... most of us know that...

I only recently came across a pricing model for software that seemed convincing to me: Older versions (= less features) are less expensive than the most current version. If the case is well presented, then people could decide whether or not a certain feature-set is necessary for them - and get a "better" price if not.

That made sense to me. It extended the life cycle of older versions, lowered the entry price and made a good fit between needs and price.

If curious, check out here: http://www.supermemo.com/english/which.htm

Hi Pierre,

> My question was to find new way of meeting new users
> following replies i had on the forum with a lite version ...

I think at some point there could be a lite version at a lower price point that has some subset of functionality in it.

But I don't want to try to develop a lite version and a "pro" version with both actively being changed at the same time since it takes additional work for me to maintain multiple active development streams. So to make things easier for me I would only make a lite version at the time that I can kind of peel it off from the main version and call it done. Right now there are still features that I want to develop which would still need to go into the lite version, things like progress bars on file loading and some various things like that.

So maybe that would be possible more around the MoI v4 timeframe when there is just a little bit more maturity in a few more areas.

But I'm still not entirely sure that will happen - in order to maintain productivity with just a single person working on stuff I try to keep things simple and one thing that helps keep things simple is just focusing on working on one core version of the software.

- Michael