However, you should know blurring is not a secure way of censoring information, as each character is still sort of recognisable, and programmatically reversing the blurring of known alphabets and typefaces is not that difficult (for numbers, you could blur each number from 0-9 and look at the resulting images)
This is even more obvious in the text that includes caps and descender characters (q/g)
Maybe you should consider a black rectangle instead?
This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me.
I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.
The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it. If you decide a price based on the level of effort it takes you then you are almost certainly not charging enough.
I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.
The danger that someone could release a free version of your app exists regardless of what you've made. That's not a very good reason not to make an app and try to sell it.
Go one level deeper. How much effort would a competitor have to put into building a competing product and undercutting you?
If the answer is "one afternoon," then you either need to figure out a way to make competition less likely or set a more realistic price.
Yes it should. If I know someone w/my same talents can come along and knock the same functionality out in a few hours it's going to make me push the price-barrier down so someone does't just come along and eat my lunch.
As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this.
Anecdotal I know - but the word "undercut" is popular in pricing conversations for a reason... aaand I've been undercut by another engineer copying my product for a cheaper price before.
We programmers should really learn to value our time and our skills better. Charge more.
What I don't like...actually what drives me totally crazy, is this:
> Buy once, upgrade for free forever!
This is not sustainable. In some ways it's even worse than free. I really wish people would stop proposing this pricing model for software. Software is never done, and a pay-once model is totally inappropriate.
Most insidiously, it gives consumers the wrong impression of software maintenance and makes it exponentially harder for other developers to implement more appropriate pricing models.
Yes I know it's jQuery - hate all ya want. Vanilla JS would be just as trivial. Drop it into a console and ctrl click to hide stuff. VERY easy to pull this off!
I don't think $20 is bad here, I don't need it so $20 seems like a lot to me, for someone taking a lot of screen shots maybe $20 is no different than $2?
If I'm expensing something for say work, nobody cares if it is $2 or $20. In fact someone might look at me weird for expesning $2 rather than $20. The breakpoints are far higher than that as far as approvals.
no thanks
.___blur-blur { filter: blur(5px); }
document.addEventListener('click',function(event){event.target.style.filter = 'blur(5px)';},false);
As someone who's had to do this for automation purposes (can't get a CC/SSN in a screenshot due to compliance) you first set sensitive fields to "password" on the input element, query the DOM to ensure a "safe state", and THEN you fill then input.
Also - other comments on blurring being reversible are correct as well.
TLDR: Replace attributes/characters to do properly censor text on a webpage. Source - 10+ years of automation (same logic still applies to vanilla front-end dev). Not a very useful tool.
If the tool did something more - maybe, but right now definitely not worth the money.
Also, people often trust a product they pay for more than something that's free. A plugin that's free could be doing all manner of nefarious things under the hood. A paid product comes with a level of implicit trust (wrongly, in my opinion, but still).
(note that this was in the context of smaller developers / indies / MicroISVs / etc, it might make sense to do the above if you are a big company with a dedicated marketing department)
But what I mean is that if it takes only an afternoon to replicate 95% of what this tool offers, then a competitor could knock it out and start charging $10, or $5, or $1, or heaven forbid, release it as a free tool.
If that happens, the only people who are going to pay $20 are those who have no idea that the other tools exist.
There are certainly companies who operate solely on marketing power and get people to pay for things they could otherwise get for free -- see ProPublica's TurboTax investigation -- but for a tool like this, I can't see how it could work out in the long term.
If you believe your time is worth $250/hour then you're going to leave a lot of money on the table when a customer comes along who values the solution you can implement at $500/hour.
Yes it's jQuery (and I know everyone on HN hates jQuery!) - a vanilla JS version would be just as trivial! Wrapping it in a Chrome manifest w/a simple "enable/disable" browser button-type interface would be about 20 minutes I guess.
"Don't try the blood and guts routine, let technology do the work."
Myself, I wouldn't ever put this into an extension because I'm certain it already exists and if not, I can bang out the base functionality in a console within 5 minutes and throw a gist in my GitLab or do a URL-JS thingy. 5m is worth $20 to me! $20 is a case of beers yo!