I am a budding (Mac OS X) shareware author, currently running an open beta.
I am intending to charge about $35 for my software, but am currently giving away limited duration (three month) licences for free.
Before going public, I ran a closed beta for about three months, with 20 or so users that I recruited from various Mac OS X forums. This helped me eliminate the most egregious and common issues.
My public beta has now been running for about a month - I've had a couple of thousand downloads, and nearly four hundred registered users - mainly finding me through version tracker and macupdate listings.
The quality of the bug reports from my public beta users has generally been fantastic (it may help that I've promised bug reporters free permanent licences) - I have about 24 bugs in my bug tracker, of which 10 are open, and maybe half of these are serious. Generally my public beta users have been far, far more productive than my closed beta users - there are lots of issues that you simply aren't going to hit until you get out to a relatively large number of users, and these bug reports are like gold.
Once I've closed the remaining serious issues, and added one remaining feature, probably early in the new year, then I'll end the public beta, start doing publicity and send the product out for review, and start charging for licenses.
This seems like a very good deal for both sides to me - poossibly even a virtuous circle. Beta users get free early access to the software, but are aware that there may be unresolved issues. They also get a chance to influence the final form of the product - one could look at that in a very cynical way (they're doing the developers work for them), but the impression that I get is that people really appreciate this,
From the developers point of view, the larger public beta base enables a much higher quality final product, which clearly beneficial to both sides...
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I am a budding (Mac OS X) shareware author, currently running an open beta.
...
I am intending to charge about $35 for my software, but am currently giving away limited duration (three month) licences for free.
Before going public, I ran a closed beta for about three months, with 20 or so users that I recruited from various Mac OS X forums. This helped me eliminate the most egregious and common issues.
My public beta has now been running for about a month - I've had a couple of thousand downloads, and nearly four hundred registered users - mainly finding me through version tracker and macupdate listings.
The quality of the bug reports from my public beta users has generally been fantastic (it may help that I've promised bug reporters free permanent licences) - I have about 24 bugs in my bug tracker, of which 10 are open, and maybe half of these are serious. Generally my public beta users have been far, far more productive than my closed beta users - there are lots of issues that you simply aren't going to hit until you get out to a relatively large number of users, and these bug reports are like gold.
Once I've closed the remaining serious issues, and added one remaining feature, probably early in the new year, then I'll end the public beta, start doing publicity and send the product out for review, and start charging for licenses.
This seems like a very good deal for both sides to me - poossibly even a virtuous circle. Beta users get free early access to the software, but are aware that there may be unresolved issues. They also get a chance to influence the final form of the product - one could look at that in a very cynical way (they're doing the developers work for them), but the impression that I get is that people really appreciate this,
From the developers point of view, the larger public beta base enables a much higher quality final product, which clearly beneficial to both sides