How is it working so far??

02/06/2012

Long past time for an update.

Market stats stands at 19,893 for regular Cadpage, 2,501 for the free/no-support version.  About mid-January the count peaked at just under 20K but has dropped off since then.  The last week it has started up again.

 185 people have paid $20 or more under the old policy where $20 got you a lifetime subscription.  (Doesn't work that way now, don't try it)

 143 people have used Paypal or sent checks for a 2011 subscription

 2786 people have purchased a $10 subscription through the Android Market

 22 people were sponsored by their departments

 762 people have been give free one year subscriptions

That is a total of 3898 Cadpage subscriptions, of which 19.5% are free subscriptions

Total income for December $3068

Total income for January $4795

That is a respectable income for one person.  I expect it to drop off over the next few months, then jump next October when the original 1 year subscriptions start to expire.  But I have enough savings to get me through until October.  So it looks like prospects for continued Cadpage support and development are pretty good.

The dark cloud on the horizon is the workload.  Ongoing maintenance has been really high for January, enough that I have little time for anything else.  I'm hoping this is a seasonal spike.  There seem to be an usual number of 911 dispatch centers changing CAD software last month, and that might be connecting to yearly budget cycles somehow.  If it doesn't slow down next month, we may have reached the point where it is all I can do to keep Cadpage running for existing users, with very little time left to develop new features and add new districts.

10/27/2011

The Market stats say Cadpage has a bit over 18K installed users.  Sounds impressive, but that figure is certainly inflated by some unknown amount.  It includes people who installed Cadpage and found it useless, but never uninstalled it.  And people either uninstalled Cadpage without telling the Market about it, or reset or lost their phones and downloaded Cadpage a second time for the new/reset phone.

185 people have paid $20 or more under the old policy where $20 got you a lifetime subscription.  (Doesn't work that way now, don't try it)

 78 people have used Paypal or sent checks for a 2011 subscription

340 people have purchased a $10 subscription through the Android Market

 99 people have been give free one year subscriptions

We only get $7 from each Android market, Google skims off 30%.  That doesn't get taken from the Paypal or checks, but we may end up paying it to them to stay on their good side.  Collecting money through other channels for app that are distributed in the Android Market as free apps is, and should be, a violation of the Android market distribution policy.  That is still being negotiated.

Prior to October when the Cadpage started getting up front about being a 30 day demo, we were reliably collecting about $1K/month.  Not too bad.  There was a time when I could probably live on that, but that was before family, kids, mortgages and stuff came into the picture.    For the last two weeks, we've collected a total of $2,750.  That would make a comfortable income if it stayed at that level.  But I expect it to drop off in November once the first demo clock runs out and all existing users have either paid up or decided they aren't going to pay.  By December we should have pretty good idea if this is going to be workable or not.