So … why charge for it now?
Over the years, I’ve been told over and over that I should be charging for Paint.NET and that people were willing to pay me for it. Accepting donations, the equivalent of a virtual “tip jar,” was a good way to accommodate this without having to develop or integrate a payment system along with serial numbers and piracy and all of that anti-fun. I’ve always been more interested in people
having Paint.NET than ensuring that it has reached its full monetization potential (it’s been partly a lifestyle choice).
However, statistically speaking, not very many people actually send a donation. The numbers are actually incredibly tiny, and it’s only because Paint.NET has such an enormous user base that I’m able to see much from this. This is totally fine though – the psychology and statistics of a system like this just lean heavily against it being very lucrative, and I had long ago made a lifestyle choice to not go down the other fork in the road towards business and marketing.
Don’t get me wrong: getting donations is actually
very rewarding! If someone likes Paint.NET so much that they’re willing to go to the PayPal website, punch in their details, and send me money, then that
really says a lot about how much they appreciate it. I’ve had folks tell me that they promise to donate when they have money, and I’ve always told them to just tell all of their friends about it instead and to not feel indebted.
I’ve wanted to put Paint.NET into the Windows Store for awhile, but I couldn’t determine a way to monetize it that fit in with the existing distribution philosophy. Microsoft won’t allow you to accept payments or solicit donations except through their billing system, which meant that the Help menu’s
Donate link had to go. And, since updates are handled automatically in the background, the polite “Please donate!” link in the updater was effectively gone as well. So if I were to give away Paint.NET for free on the Windows Store, anyone who installed it from there would probably never even see the “tip jar” and be encouraged to contribute.
So, I finally decided that I would just charge for the Store release. The Classic release will still be available and will continue to have a visible “tip jar” to encourage folks to provide financial support. And the Store release has some genuine advantages that you can pay for, if you choose.