Opinions Wanted...
 

I have been making custom mods for windows mobile and posted them on my ppcmods.com website. I have started getting into more complicated mods and plan on getting into even more complicated mods. The more complicated the mods, the more time consuming. I love the ppc community but I also need to dedicate time to the other parts of my life.

Anyhow, I have tried a couple of advertising things to generate a little bit of money but they were useless. I added a paypal donate thing but it is a nuisance. I understand that free mods are great and no one wants to pay for custom mods, but the time consuming nature of these mods deters me from making additional ones more often. The graphics part of each mod takes hours and hours.

I was thinking about possibly asking for a "lifetime subscription payment" which once paid each person would get lifetime access to all mods, even new ones. I thought maybe charging $10 for the lifetime. Win7 mobile is coming out soon so I plan to make custom things for that too, as well as when HTC comes out with new interfaces, etc.

Please give me your opinions on the lifetime subscription idea. Custom taskbar mods take a very long time to create, especially creating each and every graphic from scratch in photoshop. I need motivation and cannot dedicate so much time on this hobby without some.

Don't sugarcoat. Give it to me straight. Thanks in advance.

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well thanx for your honesty first, i think its a good idea even though i havent seen your work or if i did didnt know it was yours but it sounds good to me.

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well i understand where you are coming from, it does take a lot of time. i dont see anything wrong with the fee, hell you are providing a service to people. its up to you, everyone wants to make more money and time is money as some people say...

in the end $10 bucks for life time mods is cheap. depends on how much you update but its not bad

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you make great mods. i love your sliders and honestly I forget to donate to those that put out mod and software work as I tend to remember my chefs' wallets better. maybe others are the same and we need to look at that. I think $10 for access to all your work would be totally worth it. that being said, people then feel like paying customers and might feel entitled for support. for instance, I tried your new taskbar and it didnt work for me. i left that feedback on the thread and have not heard back. no big deal to me, bc u r sharing it with me for free. people feel different after they give u money though. and then u will start spending hours troubleshooting somebody's prob (and it will prob end up being something else they did to break their phone). all this being said, I now feel a strong urge to buy u a couple beers, though I am not currently using any of your mods (but often do). no good answer. keep up the great mods and maybe consider ditching wp7 and coming android me!

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I am up for the $10...count me in.

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ill be honest, had no clue who you were till i saw this.. went and looked around, and you do some pretty awesome work... not gonna lie, i picked up the Blossom Slider and i like it alot.. i like your android taskbars too, not giving up my new anastasia one just yet, but your android one is next..

if i found myself wanting something else of yours and it was now a fee to subscribe, i definitely really think about it..

sounds like a good idea.. maybe list em at .50cents each if someone doesnt wanna pay the $10 flat fee.. some people just never feel like they have 10 extra bucks to their name, but theyd spend 50 cents no prob to get the 1 mod they want.. every 100 DLs gets ya 50 bucks... itd stack up fast im tellin ya..

you were unknown to me b4, but youve been bookmarked!

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OK I appreciate the support from the responses. I implemented the membership thing. Hopefully things go well with it. It just takes me very long to do these mods you guys have no clue how tedious it is.

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post a link to your stuff and we or atleast i know its hard and thats why i dont do it. lol

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So what is going to happen now with your work thats already posted around the site now that it's paid for content?

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I guess new content will have to be downloaded from the website. I am not gonna go around asking people to remove any cabs they posted. I also realized that some people posted direct links to the content in threads, now the links will send them to the homepage. Well hopefully the transition wont be too tough.

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I've never asked for a donation for my work and never will. I do what I do because I enjoy it, even though I don't use most of the stuff myself. But if other people find my icons, etc. useful then it's worth it to me.

I put at least 75 hours into the last icon set I made (probably closer to 100). I worked on it just about every day for two months. Way too much time really, but an hour or so a day didn't really affect my personal life.

I don't see anything wrong with requiring a subscription for your work, but if it's taking up too much of your time then maybe you need to rethink your priorities.

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I support your decision and wish you well. Keep up the great work!

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I hear what you are saying. I work at home doing website design, etc. so finding the time to do these mods is not tough. Designing icons and creating mods is totally different. Each taskbar mod takes me at least 10 hours but I like making them. I dont think that the $10 is too much to ask for lifetime.

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I'd say put a cap on it, like what is your work worth to you..?? Say like $200 or something like that for what's out there now, so when your cap is reached a new project can be started with a new cap and so on and so forth... There's always gonna be stuff out there for free so when faced with the decision to use something for free or pay for it, plenty of people well take the free route especially when the comparisons aren't far off... But I think since the economy is so shitty right now people should be doing whatever they can to generate income so if you can get some dough in your pockets by charging a lifetime subscription fee, rock on brotha...

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I knew when I saw this thread yesterday I should have gone and downloaded them all lol. I wish you the best of luck with this, once I get the change I plan on subscribing, being unemployed sucks at the moment. economy really needs to pick up.

Thanks again for the great work.

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Wish you much success... I for one know how time consuming it is creating these icons from scratch.

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Hi, rtwood
I respect the decision you made for the "membership thing". You've created great mods and you know I'd spent applause (but unfortunately no bucks...) - remember you made especially chromed numbers as I wished. \\:D/
Most of the response in this thread support your decision, ok.
But you may consider, that now your work is "only" for a special group of members - with a special device and a special OS and there will be more expenditure of time for support the members require.
I for myself own no TP2 and use no WM6.5.x, but I use your icons and fonts on my device just doing handicrafts. That means it takes hours for me too... :smile: and for that I'm not able to pay a fee, I hope you understand. May be you can compromise over sharing your work: first a membership for ready mods and second some free stuff, like icons or so for doing handicrafts?
I hope my English is not too bad to understand what I mean.
Anyway, keep up your creative work, I wish you all the best.:thumbleft:
Regards from Germany
SeCo

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I really don't think a paid membership is a great idea when you think of all the people doing the same thing for free and just accepting donations. I will admit you do some great work but if I can get a slider icon set or taskbar icons from the next guy, but for free, I'm jumping on the free stuff. Think of this and look in the CDMA TP2 Upgrade section at the same time, there are 30 people making ROMs for the TP2 and some are bound to be similar. If your favorite Chef decided he was going to start charging and another chef had a similar ROM, just as stable and just as fast, but it was free what would you do??

EDIT: Like I said, you do offer great work so I wish you luck.

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That's what I was saying...

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There are a lot of other developers who ask for contributions or make money by people downloading from their online storage accounts (companies pay per download amounts and filesize like hotfile.com, megaupload). There is sometimes a reason for some developers releasing roms quite often.

Unless someone contributes to the community they should not complain when others ask for contributions. It seems like many leechers feel they are entitled to leech without question.

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1st off I know how you feel you put hours of work and feel if people enjoy your work they should show thanks and offer a buck or 2. I remember when I waas 1st learning how to make games for the cellphone. I really was making them for myself but since people share online , I put out the games for people to download free. I tell you people are demanding!! Some went after me like they payed for the game when I 1st started out. When I buckled down and meet a partner , I decided to make a payed game. It took many hours and lot of planning to make something original and fun. I probaly released 12-15 games for free . The only difference between me and you is you gave out your good stuff for free while I saved the good stuff for commercial release. About 30% of windows mobile users download warez. Another 80% just download freeware. That leaves you with 20% of windows mobile users that buy items. Its a tough market but just keep at it. I read the responses and understand most opinions here. The only ones I dont understand is people that say oh you should just make it and release it free, dont charge for anything. Obviously if thier boss said your not getting payed for 10 hours of work , those same people will flip out. That mentality is why developers move to different platforms and dont stay here. The result is alot of alpha and beta's products. There is alot of good freeware but its getting less and less day by day. I mean there is no such thing as a freeware foodstore or clothing mall Hahahaha. I really dont understand why someone would tell another person to spend 50-100 hours on a project and give it out for free. I do understand if they say well I will never pay for it, thats cool. But no-one here in thier right mind will go on a job and tell the boss I will work for free 3 days out of the week lol thats just silly. Good luck!!!

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Well, the world can live without ROMs, but what you're doing is much appreciated.

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You said it perfectly. Unfortunately many people expect everything on the internet to be free, meanwhile the same people offer nothing in return. Weird sense of entitlement.

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One other thing I forgot to add in my other post. Another reason I never ask for donations is that most of my icon sets were derived from other people's work. Only my wallpapers and Poptoon icon set were completely orginal. And they were program generated. I'm no artist. I'm lucky if I can draw a straight line with Photoshop. Asking for money when other people are the real artists just doesn't feel right to me.

Anyway, I noticed that many of your sliders use other people's icons. So will they be getting part of the subscription fee for their hard work? Also, many, if not all icon sets I've come across, usually have a disclaimer that they are for personal use only, not commercial. Charging a subscription sounds like commercial use to me. So I guess I changed my mind on this. If everything you were offering for a subscritption were 100% your own work I would have no problem with it. But since it's not, charging for other people's work is wrong, unless of course the original artists are getting a piece of the pie.

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The only mods that are using others' artwork which are copyrighted are about 13 sliders. I have contacted each artist and am awaiting response. If they deny my request then I will remove them no problem. All taskbars and clocks were made by me only. Many of the art sources on the sliders are from free commercial use websites like iconsetc and iconspedia or were made by me.

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Good of you to contact the other artists. Something to note. Just because you obtained icons from a free site doesn't mean they are free to use as you wish. Most of those sites harvest icon sets from other sources. The link you provided on your site to the Token icon pack from Iconspedia has the following license info:

CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
http://www.iconspedia.com/pack/token-light-228-/

So maybe you should double check everything.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to discourage what you're doing. I appreciate your work. In fact, I'm using one of your sliders. Just giving it to you straight with no sugar coat like you asked.

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I agree your work is great, and I understand the time you put into it too. $10 isn't too much to ask but one of the points made above, that is your charging for it, there needs to be support offered also is very valid. And one issue I have is you will offer a free membership, but only to someone who has also created work of this sort, or a loadable app. What about some of the peeps here who don't have the knowledge to create app/mods, but offer their knowledge in helping new users out? There are a number of users, and I'm not going to mention any names, that clearly go far out of their way to offer assistance rather than constantly posting "search is your friend" but have not created an app or mod themselves. Good luck and keep up the great work!

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I have slowly but surely been getting approval from the artists. I have a few left but will get permission from all of them soon enough. They have all visited the website and know that it is $10 to download for lifetime.

As far as for good forum members, I cannot go and make sure everyone who emails me is in fact telling the truth. Also, I dont know how to define what a good forum member is and isnt. Saying installable apps makes it easier to distinguish.

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Well, since you said be honest...I'll never pay for any of your stuff. It's nice work, but I'll just do it myself or find someone else who still enjoys doing it as a hobby. You started out just taking other peoples icons and using cfcgui to place them in newer sense slider files without any credit given. I think all of your posts will be removed from xda since it's basically just advertising now (seems they've had some trouble lately with others trying to sell their stuff from what I've read). Make sure you at least give chainfire some money for giving you some of the tools you use for free ;). Good luck to you.

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If you make your own slider then please share it with everyone. Make another 25 sliders and share them as well. Then make another 15 or so clock digits. Start working on taskbars (good luck). Then when you realize that even more people want newer stuff and you would love to make them but could use something in return for once, you will understand.

Also, I did not do any of the "replacing icons from others work with cfcgui" as you claim, which makes no sense and is not how you make a slider anyway. I will write a tutorial and post it on the website on how to make sliders, clocks and taskbars. The tutorials will help everyone to make their own or to at least to try and realize how much work goes into them.

I do however thank santod for helping me in the very beginning with sliders.

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Sorry man, I wasn't trying to be confrontational. I've made plenty of my own sliders, taskbars, and clock numbers through the years...so don't feel the need to write a tutorial because of me.

I thought most people just used cfcgui to find the right manila files, maybe export the stock images to png, edit/replace what you want with photoshop or similar program, and then use cfcgui to import the edited png file. I was not aware you wrote your own program(s) to accomplish these things.

The comment about using other sliders was because there were sliders using the same exact icons for older versions of manila/sense as the ones you made for sense 1920+. You probably just liked the same ones as other people who made sliders before you and used the same icons source, so sorry for my simplistic thinking.

At least you won't have to maintain any threads at xda anymore since it appears they have removed them for violating the rules.

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Honestly people are going to say anything not to pay. The response I have seen here on why not to pay for anything is responsible for my tummy aching laughter. I not going to pay for that thou lol!!