First commercial release of TuneSleeve!

During the past few weeks, I’ve been busy evaluating eCommerce solutions for selling TuneSleeve. I finally chose eSellerate, as their processing fees were not so bad for the services they offer. And one major selling point for me was that their product licensing engine is available for Windows and Mac. Why is that important, you ask? Well, I’ll let your imagination work a bit here until I have more to say about it.

So Polkapps now uses eSellerate as its online store provider, and trial/registered manager for TuneSleeve. From all the testing I did, everything works just great. I hope that the experience will be as smooth for my customers!

Now that this administrative task is behind me, I’ll be able to focus on the new features that I have planned for TuneSleeve, as well as some new projects. More on that later!

Since I announced that I wanted to sell TuneSleeve instead of offering it for free, I have had a few comments (on this blog and via email) about how bad a decision that was. Those comments generally mention how bad this is for the freeware movement, and that it is sad that such a great product won’t be free anymore.

I don’t want to get into a religious debate here, but let me clarify my decision: I was pleased to offer TuneSleeve for free, as it had initially been done as a hobby. But during the past year, I have received a lot of feature requests, most of which are pretty interesting and which I believe would please many people.

Unfortunately, I was not able to commit any time to work on TuneSleeve as a hobby, as I have 2 young kids, a full-time day job and a house to renovate that all keep me pretty busy. In the end of the day, having close to zero time to spend on hobbies, I preferred to spend that time on something else. In order to allocate quality time to improving TuneSleeve, I had to free up a couple of evenings a week.

So, I was faced with 2 choices: either leave TuneSleeve as it was, with no new features and no bug fixes, but free. Or start asking some real money for it, and in return provide some real development time on it to make it better and better.

I really wanted to see TuneSleeve improve, so this is why I chose the second option.

Will it work and be worthwhile? Only time will tell. But for now, I am thrilled to start this new adventure of having my own company and “real” paying customers to whom I am commited to providing great customer service, and a great product that will evolve over time.