Shareware protection

[MerrionComputin]

If you want to provide a try-before-buy piece of software but still encourage the user to actually buy the software, what is the best way to go about this?

[plenderj]

To date we've found that if you feature limit the application just a bit, and also put in a nag.
So the feature limit part... the app will allow the user to see what the full version app will do, but they cant actually do anything with that data.

So the easiest way to acheive this is to disable (ie. remove all the code for) the save function or whatever.

Also, when the user is going into the application.
Just a little timer counting down from 3 or 5 seconds saying something like "thank you for trying our product [..], if you like it .. blah blah buy me..."

I also put a "Buy Me" button at the bottom of that nag screen that brings the user straight into a regnow purchase page.