Learning from our experience with licensing solutions.

Rather than making mistakes when evaluating copy protection systems, we want you to learn from our experience—and what an experience!

We spent over $2000 on two copy protection solutions in our search for the perfect solution, but they ended up costing nearly 50 times that much in support costs, customer refunds and lost opportunities.

The first system we chose was a cheaper option. It cost around $300, plus the extra cost of the web-based forms for Internet authorization.

It had most of the features we wanted, but its low price was a false economy. It took days to get the code implemented correctly on our own servers, and when we tried to take the system online for web-based authorization, our security-conscious ISP refused to host the necessary scripts, so we had to modify them.

Already operating on razor-thin margins, the supplier was reluctant to offer much support and we often waited for three days for answers to our queries.

Flirting with disaster

The real cost was to our reputation. Even after an apparently successful testing cycle, the live system proved unreliable and customers were forced to re-license their software over the telephone. The copy protection software lost customers' licenses whenever superficial changes were made to the PC (such as a hard disk defragmentation). Our support helpline was flooded with calls, and we had to begin refunding license fees.

Desperate to stop further damage to our image, we eliminated the system and stumbled along with no licensing model until we could find something more suitable.

This time we chose a high-end supplier, paying roughly $900 for the core client product and extra fees for the server components. The code was easy to implement, the support was better, and the product had more features. We thought our problems were solved, but we were wrong!

Our customers were forced to use license codes over 40 digits in length, making them very difficult to transcribe and convey over the telephone. They constantly got them wrong and had to call back.

And just as with the first solution, when customers made any changes to their PCs the protection failed, forcing the customer to call our support department and re-license the product.

By this time we had lost around $100,000 in sales, costs, refunds, development time, and extra support, meaning that the costs outweighed the benefits of having any copy protection at all!

Finally we decided to develop our own system.

We were determined to solve the reliability issues that plagued other software, and we pledged to make our software easy to deploy and use. We spent two years creating PRO-Tector™.

See "The Top Ten Questions for Vendors" for the next part of the story...