Why GenoPro is now Shareware?

Until August 2001, GenoPro was distributed free of charge because it was supported by advertising. This business model was generating sufficient income to provide resources to improve the product and give quality support our users. During the month of July 2001, our last sponsor went bankrupt, leaving GenoPro without any possible income from advertising in addition to forgo 6 months of unpaid commissions.

In the effort to distribute GenoPro free, GenoPro partnered with the following sponsors:

Cydoor.com - GenoPro joined Cydoor in 1999 but never received a single payment for its 900 licenses. Cydoor has no reporting tool and do not reply to emails. Stay away from them!!!
Radiate.com - GenoPro received a grand total of $17 USD for its 1100 licenses. This grand total is the income generated by 1100 loyal users for a period of 8 months.
Conducent.com - This one disappeared while trying to recruit GenoPro as a partner. The website www.conducent.com has been down since October 2000. Corel was affiliated with Conducent to distribute its office productivity software - the Corel deal lasted until Conducent disappeared from the map!
Web3000.com - Best payout until they filed for bankruptcy in July 2001.

GenoPro declined about 10 more sponsors because of questionable business ethics (spyware) or buggy advertising product. Consequently, GenoPro concluded there is no such thing as a reliable and honest partner to generate income from advertising. During the past years, GenoPro got criticized countless times for distributing advertising. To get a more accurate answer, GenoPro placed an online poll: 73% (3902 of 5329) participants voted against distributing GenoPro with advertising.

As a result, GenoPro is now distributed without advertising. When you install GenoPro, you get a clean, ad-free, fully functional copy of GenoPro. The only negative aspect is you get this reminder to support GenoPro by purchasing GenoPro Gold.

History about GenoPro

I started writing GenoPro in 1998 to assist my father creating a visual representation of our family. Quickly many others were interested using the unfinished program. I decided to make GenoPro available on the Internet for free because I was not interested in collecting money from individuals. I never tried to sell GenoPro one way or another. In return I was asking GenoPro users to send me a post card if they though GenoPro was worth a stamp plus a post card. I was very happy and proud to deliver a high quality product for free.

During the past years I received hundreds of post cards from all around the world. This was great, but somehow the costs of distributing GenoPro were increasing and the time required to reply emails became a burden.

In 1999, GenoPro has been downloaded 33,000 times solely from Download.com to become the most popular genealogy download of the year. In 2000, GenoPro became the #1 genealogy download at Download.com and at many other web sites distributing genealogy software. GenoPro got many reviews and press coverage by computer magazines, national newspapers, radio shows from all around the world. The number of visitors and downloads from www.genopro.com increased to a point GenoPro was kicked out by its web hosting sponsor due to hardware bottlenecks. During the month of January 2001 (prior launching version 1.90), www.genopro.com got 1.2 million hits and a tenfold more daily installations than the previous year. According to PC Data, a trustworthy company gathering data on web usage, GenoPro received 230,000 unique visitors during the month of February 2001. Of course, such a number is small compared to Yahoo.com with 64 millions of visitors, but ranks GenoPro to the top 5,000 most visited web sites around the world.

Considering GenoPro was written during spare time while I was a full-time bachelor, I decided to make GenoPro a business. Being stubborn to keep GenoPro free, I decided to include advertising with GenoPro to generate income, but all the sponsors went bankrupt, and/or never paid.

The Future of GenoPro

GenoPro Inc. remains a profitable business and is there to stay. We are currently developing version 2.0 which will also be free (supported by advertising, of course). To ensure a quality product with all the desired features, GenoPro version 2.0 will be released when ready.

If you believe GenoPro is a good quality product, pass the word around and tell your friends; this is the best contribution you can make to support GenoPro.

Yours Truly,
-- Dan Morin
President & CEO, GenoPro Inc.

Contact GenoPro

If you wish to contact GenoPro, you have to purchase GenoPro Gold. GenoPro Gold gives you a special mailbox to write to us. Click here to read the benefits of purchasing GenoPro Gold. If you write to , you will get an auto-reply with links to get all the help you need to install, uninstall and use GenoPro. You can use the mailbox if you wish to contact GenoPro for business related issue.

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