This works in many markets. Look at clothing labels for instance. Take a fairly plain shirt or something, put a tiny logo on it, double the price. It works.
My personal example is that I have several music recordings downloadable for free from my website. No one ever listens to them as far as I know. At least I've never randomly received feedback from my music website. I got a record label to carry a track once, sold as MP3 for a low price, and all of a sudden the track hits some top-10s, etc. People pay more attention when you attach a price tag.
In all honesty, I actually think this would be a good approach for open-source software funding: open the source, but package it up nicely and sell binaries. I suspect that people would buy, even if someone else comes along with their own binary; include a trademark clause perhaps to stop them from naming it the same thing.
I think you could do this with open source, but it would only last so long. I tried this a few years ago (I found some open source software, fixed bugs and added some features) and sold it.
In the beginning I got sales. But over time, I got less and less because people would just re-package it and give it out for free (they are allowed to do this under the GNU).
I suppose it depends on your demographic of users too. More tech savvy users will figure this out quickly
My personal example is that I have several music recordings downloadable for free from my website. No one ever listens to them as far as I know. At least I've never randomly received feedback from my music website. I got a record label to carry a track once, sold as MP3 for a low price, and all of a sudden the track hits some top-10s, etc. People pay more attention when you attach a price tag.
In all honesty, I actually think this would be a good approach for open-source software funding: open the source, but package it up nicely and sell binaries. I suspect that people would buy, even if someone else comes along with their own binary; include a trademark clause perhaps to stop them from naming it the same thing.