From user's point of view, if you have > 2 GPUs of decent speed, it is better to pay 35 XPM since you should be able to ROI, even better if pool option was in in the first place (assuming w/o dev fee).
That would be 35 XPM per card. There has never been a pool option.
It would not be more profitable to the end user to pay 35 XPM vs having a 10% dev fee, until they've made at least 350 XPM (this is when a 10% fee would amount to more than 35 XPM). So tell me please, who has made that many? Not too many folks. Don't ignore the rising difficulty, possible policy changes and eventual arrival of new (faster) miners that can completely change the mining landscape.
However, solo mining is not that popular; most ppl prefer stable income and primeGPU does not have the means to collect % of earning from solo mining early on.. was until Claymore showed it was possible.
Solo mining is okay when you can count on a couple of blocks or more per day on average. If you are unlucky or getting stales, it's not too bad. But when it's one block per week, which could be stale... and you have a rising difficulty, it makes no sense to solo mine. Soon it's gonna be one block a month... Imagine that it is stale. You've made nothing, after 720 hours of mining... you could be unlucky and get your stale block after 2 months instead of 1 as well...
We still believe it was the right one.
Well, I don't know if it was financially. You maybe have made more XPM to date, than you would with a 10% dev fee, assuming the same amount of clients (they certainly haven't, though). But you'd have a lot MORE people who are using Claymore's miner now mining with yours the whole time, if you had started with a 10% fee, therefore you'd have way MORE XPM now as well.
You messed this up quite a bit.
We had not the fastest miner but the only miner at the beginning.
(We still have the fastest miner at least for 280x).
I'm counting from the day you offered it for sale, since I'm arguing a 10% dev fee would have been better than a certain amount of XPM. Sure you have the fastest miner for 280x, I know. But that does not necessarily translate into more XPM, than mining with a slower miner on a pool.
If you read the first pages of the thread you will see our reasonings:
1) We wanted to make money both for ourselves and our customers - hense the whole 1440 licenses/first month
thing.
Note: everone who bought the license for 65 xpm either got a 30 xpm refund or an additional free license.
2) We were first and everyone was under impression it's another "xpm gpu" scam - so we made open-source-client
/ closed-source-server to make everyone a bit more relaxed about installing our miner. The dev fee just doesn't
belong in this scheme. Claymore didn't have to convince anyone it's possible to have an xpm gpu miner.
I know all that, but in retrospect it was not the best decision. The difficulty rose so fast that it was not the best route to follow soon after launch, which is evident even from your own actions, namely, miner is no longer for sale, 1440 license limit is no longer there... That's what happens to subpar decisions. They get changed when it is realized they are subpar.
I totally want your miner to be successful otherwise. I'm not trying to bash it.