Cut to the chase: 30 days for an evaluation would be just fine, except it’s not 30 days for evaluation. It’s “We will let you have our software installed on your machine for 30 contiguous calender days. After that, pay up or piss off.”
How does that work out for me:
- Take off 8 days for weekends. That leaves 22.
- Take off 1 day per week for overhead, minimum. That leaves in the best case 18.
- Take off 12 days for doing billable work, so I can eat and pay rent, essentially cover costs. That leaves 6 days.
- Of the 6 (and this is generous) days remaining, I may want to evaluate 2 or 3 applications, all of which require 6-8 hours blocks of unbroken time to get past the File -> New step.
- At the end of my “30 days” I get to decide whether to I want to spend real $$$ to actually purchase the product, based on what I can recoup by charging clients for using the product.
- Where is my profit here?
My point is that time-bombed “evaluation licenses” almost useless to me as a small business entrepeneur. It’s not necessarily the $300-$3000 license cost of the product, it’s the time I have to spend seeing whether the product:
- Fulfills my needs
- Fulfills my clients needs
- Performs as advertised
Essentially, time-bombed software with such a short fuse treats users as though their time is worthless.
Once in a while, I install some 30 day demo with the best of intentions to evaluate. Life gets in the way. I don’t get around to it until the time is up. Game over. In a way, this works for me because I haven’t actually lost any time over it. But the vendor has for sure, 100%, lost me as a customer.
