I just had someone suggest that we should take part in a scheme like MacHeist, but where we don’t get paid at all!

The cheek of it!

We’re expected to provide technical support (a significant drain on our time—and therefore a significant cost—as we sell disk utility software), and users will expect discounts on future upgrades.

Oh, and let’s not forget the 250MB+ bootable CD template images that each of these users would want to download. Quite a significant bandwidth cost, that; we already transfer hundreds of GBs a month, without thousands of people suddenly hitting us for free copies.

What’s even worse, the people in question weren’t sure whether they were organising one “heist” or many, and don’t really seem to know how many people they’re going to give the software away to. In fact, they haven’t really thought about it at all.

About the only saving grace is that they claim they won’t be making any money out of it.

Who are they? I’m not going to give them any publicity by saying. But I’d advise other developers to stay well away from this kind of deal. If you want publicity, go buy some advertising. It may look expensive but it’ll be cheaper in the long run, plus you’ll attract people who will actually pay for your apps.