As some might have noticed we are going to overhaul the phoenxsoftware business strategy. This might not be very intresting, but if you know that this means we are going to cancel the development of many apps it might concern you.
This all came in response to a 50% decline in our website’s traffic from nearly 30.000 users a month to +-15.000. It opened our eyes and made us realize that investing so much time and money in something where we don’t get anything in return for is useless. To be honest with numbers, Phoenxsoftware and surrounding services cost 280$ for the server, 60$ for each of our 2 domains (Phoenxsoftware.com and Blastgen.com), 99$ for our iPhone Developers account and 99$ for MobileMe synchronization services, making a total of 598$. And how much do we earn annually? 200$ from advertising revenue. This means we lose nearly $400 dollars a year for bringing free apps to the people.
Some will say that it could be because we aren’t renowned enough. To give you some numbers, we have +-500.000 Duelpro Users, +-700.000 36-image converter users, 100 people testing our Antivirus Blastgen’s Beta and about 100.000 people using various windows utilities we made. A 300.000 visitors a year website and 1.3 million people using our software deliver us $200 a year. That’s how much our current business model earns us. We are a team of volunteers and still people think we are evil and rich.
First of all, you have noticed that we are developing more apps for the iPhone. That’s because there is no money in Windows development. Windows users don’t pay for software, Mac/iPhone users do. So that’s why all Windows users can wait until we are finished building and maintaining iPhone apps before the next Windows app will be launched, which is 36-image converter 4.7. We need the money from our iPhone development to fund Windows Development.
We now have two versions of our windows software in the iPhone production queue, iDuelpro Mobile (Duelpro) and yes, I can admit it, we built an iPhone version of 36-image converter called “iPhix” that was the big surprise on the iPhone part. It should be released to the App Store within this and a week. Even the site is already online, but more about that later.
We are planning a lot more iPhone apps and other apps for the Mac, but also windows apps with premium services. There’s still some software that deserves our attention, 36-image converter will remain our flagship together with all 36-products, but will be linked to a premium web service in a while and we will advertise iPhix during the 36IC installation to people with iTunes installed. ROC will get ROC Plus a premium version which allows custom ROC ID’s. And we will also continue the development of Blastgen, our commercial antivirus.
Now which application’s development will be halted then? Here you go :
-Mphix
-FileTorment
-SpeedShut (OpenSource)
-FileTorment Suite
-InfoBlaster IN4
-LockPhix (OpenSource)
-CachePhix
-LoadDown
-SpeedShut Lite (OpenSource)
Some of these applications may still become OpenSource. But for most of them development isn’t paying of and hence to our new business model, useless. ROC will also be on this list when we have no ROC Plus sales.
So in short, most of our apps will be ditched, we don’t care anymore about our annual amount of visitors, we are silently ditching windows for cross-platform development and we want to run at least break even.
