Thoughts on MacHeist & Co.

A lot has been written about MacHeist in the last couple of days, serious criticism and defense. And as we participated in various promotion events recently, I want to say a few words to this controversy and about our engagement with MacHeist, MacZOT, and MacAppADay. To make it short, Oliver Breidenbach from Boinx Software and Roustem Karimov from onepasswd.com have said it all. I totally agree with them.

All these events are adventurous attempts to find new ways to sell and to promote Mac software. They offer us as Mac software vendors new platforms to advertise our products and to offer their users e.g. discounts or freebies. Taking part in these promotion events gives us the opportunity to reach new customers who would elsewise never have heard of us because they’re not passing along the places on the Internet where we are usually advertising or announcing our products.

Now, some are claiming that either these web sites are ripping us off or bringing only customers interested in anything free. They are not ripping us off, we have either mutually agreed on a share or fee, or they’re offering their marketing services for free and make their money through advertising. That’s just fair. They offer a service to the community, users get discounts or free software, and we get the opportunity to sell our products to them, or upgrades. We may give our software for a significant discount, like at MacZOT’s and MacHeist’s, but we also sell so many more copies that it’s still a win-win-win for all of us, users, promotors, and us.

Kudos to the crews of MacHeist, MacZOT, and MacAppADay for creating these new platforms. And to quote Oliver Breidenbach: “If they succeed, it may well be that this becomes a good revenue stream for Mac developers. Because if they succeed, the next time, the amount of money that we will demand will increase dramatically. And if it turns out that it was all not worth our while, we simply will have to mark it down as another way not to get rich.”