It is not easy these days to squeeze money out of users of software applications any more, maybe due to the Open Source phenomenon, may be due to the ready availability of copied versions etc. Maybe we should develop on the shareware model a bit and see if the revenue can be collected in a different way. How about incorporating the payment system made extremely popular lately by the mobile phone companies i.e. SMS. Users just text a message to a phone number, and payment is automatically collected through their accounts. This will completely eliminate the overhead associated with setting up an Ecommerce website. Also, this model is more efficient for high volume but low nominal payments. The problem remains in how to tie this payment system to the software upgrade cycle so that users who have paid get their needs prioritised accordingly.

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