So who actually shells out cash for free shareware programs.?
For example: Winzip ®. I just switched to a new computer at work, and found out that I didnt have a way to open compressed files.So I googled “Winzip” and downloaded it. It’s free and it works fine–so why would anybody pay $30 for the “official” version, even with all the documentation, etc?
I assume that somehow, sometimes,somebody actually sends money somewhere. But how often?
Most of the time, you are given a time-limited license (e.g. 30 days).
In many cases, the software has additional limitations (e.g. can’t save a file).
In any case, the WinZip folks just got their first $30 from me a few weeks ago even though I have been using their product for forever. Got a new machine and needed WinZip and didn’t have an installer, so I said “What the hell…it’s an excellent product” and bought it. I don’t remember if the original trial I downloaded before buying was a time-limited trial or just “nagware”.
I agree with minor7flat5. In my case I purchased WinZip about 7 or 8 years ago. I think I paid about $10 or $15 at the time. Since this is a product I get a lot of use out of, it was well worth the price. The fact that the upgrades since then have been free is a nice bonus as well (actually, this might not be true of WinZip 10.0, since I had a problem with my software key).
I always make a habit of purchasing well written, or often used shareware. As someone who writes software myself, I can appreciate the fact that these programmers should be compensated for their software that I use and enjoy.
I also hope any money use to purchase said software will go toward future improvements of the product.
As to your actual question of “how often”, I don’t think you will find a factual answer for that. Sure you could count how many times the program has been downloaded vs how many licenses purchased, but that wouldn’t necessarily be an accurate metric. For example, for each clean windows installation I do, I re-download winzip from their site each time, even though I only paid the license fee once.
I read somewhere that about 4% of people who use shareware pay for it. My experience was considerably lower. I usually pay for shareware if I use it, but I’m surprised to find that someone else besides me has paid for WinZip. 
I imagine Ambrosia Software must make something. They’ve been around forever and their stuff is totally rad, and fairly non-intrusive as far as shareware goes.
It’s possible to make money as a shareware author. They usually don’t spend money on advertising or a big corporate staff (some are one-person operations), so it’s possible to make a living, even if only a fraction of users purchase the software license. Years ago I had a college roommate who paid the tuition and rent from his shareware income.
In case anyone is overwhelmed with guilt after having used winzip w/o paying, check out 7zip , a freeware alternative.
I have paid for some shareware products: Opera, because I used it every day so I thought I should. It has since become freeware, though. Popfile, which is actually open source but accepts donations. The reason is because I had been using McAfee Spamkiller, a commercial product. I purchased an upgrade to SpamKiller 5, but then discovered that the new version had completely broken the program. So, I went looking for free alternatives and found Popfile. I was so impressed by it that I claimed a refund for the Spamkiller product (you can do that within 30 days), and sent the money to the Popfile project.
I’ve both purchased and written shareware software in the past. There are some programs I have downloaded and tried that I have found so eminently useful that I’ve gone and paid for them, because the value of the software easily met or exceeded its actual cost.
As a shareware author – though admittedly what I’ve written is niche market stuff at best – I’ve made a few bucks. Enough to keep me in morning coffees for a while anyway. The return was almost negligible beside the actual time I invested writing the stuff, but the stuff I wrote was stuff I wanted to use myself but which did not exist on the platform I was using at the time, so really it was beneficial to me as well. I considered the shareware regs I got as a bit of a bonus.
You forget that corporations are some of the biggest pay users for software and they are often strict about keeping things nice and legit. Shareware often has individual conditions of use that are different than the corporate ones. I have worked in IT for 8 years and the companies that I have worked for have shelled out big bucks for completely legal copies of things like Winzip and other essential utilities. Some shareware gets bought out from its author by companies that hope to make money from it. Toad is a great Oracle utility for big corporate databases. It started out as freeware that some guy wrote to make his own job easier. It became so popular and valuable that Quest software bought rights to it. I have insisted that two companies that I went to work for by it and the licenses they happily paid were about $2000 per chair. At the same time, Toad is available as a free version with a lag in features that you have to redownload every 60 days but they just wanted to pay the money and have it done.
I sell shareware, but unlike the OP’s post, mine has some significant limitations in unregistered versions. I also work as a software engineer at a fortune 500 company.
The shareware job pays me about 1/8 of what the professional job does, and takes about 1/4 the number of hours per week. But since software maintenance takes a relatively small amount of continuing effort, I could stop developing new shareware any time and basically just “ride” on the revenue stream, probably for years.
My Google skills are failing to locate it now, but about ten years ago I read an online article where a programmer did an experiment. He released a small Windows application that would randomly choose it’s registration method when it started up. Some would be “free to try,” no limitations, others would be crippled in some way, some just nagged. He compared the rates of payment for the different models, and discovered what you’d probably guess: that the “crippled” version outsold the nagging and “free to try” versions by a subtantial margin. I don’t remember the margin, but I remember a line to the effect that he thought the experiment had cost him about $17,000 in a year (for the “free” people who didn’t register).
So, he thought 100% of the people who downloaded the gratis version would have paid if it hadn’t been offered? What a stupid idea. A moment’s thought should serve to conclude that there are many more people in the world who will download gratis software than will pay for software that does the same thing, so the majority of people who downloaded his gratis version would not have paid for it.
I’ve paid for Opera, and just recently the PDF995 suite. I pay for it because I feel that it is worth it, and I want to encourage these companies to continue what they are doing. Presumably there’s enough people like me around to make it worth while for them.
I remember reading this study when I was considering releasing some shareware. All my goodies are just freeware now ;). The point is, though, that the users didn’t know that it was nagware, crippled, or completely free. The program randomly decided at first execution what it’s behavior model would be. This was before the time when there were 100,000 sites hosting the same software telling you the license types – after all, what would it say: license type = random?
I will usually make a donation to the website with PayPal if that’s an option and I like the program. I did that with Spybot.
It gave me warm fuzzy feelings!
Funny. That’s the same argument I make when I debate piracy numbers. 
(FWIW, I’ve released cripped shareware and have watched it get cracked and pirated. And that was fine – I didn’t expect the people who downloaded a cracked version to pay for it even if it wasn’t pirated)
But that’s another discussion entirely. Shareware relies heavily on the honor system. Because of that though it is not terribly lucrative unless you’re a prolific coder and have released enough pieces of software that the meagre amount of shareware registrations you recieve from each can combine into sometihng resembling a salary. That’s not to say that the vast majority of people aren’t “honest” in the sense that they won’t honor the shareware concept if not presented with compelling reasons to do so (crippling), but rather if there are no compelling reminders to register, most people will simply end up putting it out of their minds or putting it off indefinitely. Sometimes it just takes a long time. Last year I ran into someone online who was (and to a degree still is) a user of one of the programs I wrote. I had abandoned it years ago, but when I bumped into him online he actually wanted to register. I declined but thanked him for the honesty and show of support, then told him how to make himself a reg key.
Oh, randomly. I missed that somehow, and I skipped right ahead to the stupidity. Stupid me.
Well, that’s odd. Download sites usually inform you beforehand what license the software is distributed under and let you make your decision prior to getting the package. I suppose that actually strengthens his claim, assuming the same mix of people got the ‘randomly gratis’ version as got the ‘randomly shareware’ version. Which is always an underlying assumption in statistical tests.
So his numbers might be worth something after all.
Interestingly, I’ve heard that in many cases, developing Macintosh shareware actually works out better financially than developing for Windows PCs. The market share is tiny, but you have a much better chance of getting your product seen because it probably has fewer competitors. For example, Graphic Converter is a phenomenal shareware program for OS X only, and every mac user I know has purchased a copy. There isn’t really a true competitor and it’s practically indispensable. In fact, I think Apple was including it for a while (maybe they still are?) with the operating system.
-Tofer
I have a shareware program I’ve been selling since about 1996. The way I look at it, I have a hobby that actually produces an income, which is quite different from most hobbies. Is it real money? I typically get $15-20k/year from it, so over the last nine years, I guess that adds up to a significant amount.
I did the bulk of the develoment back before I had kids, and since then, it still takes time, with maintenance and support.