Shemes.com is going commercial.- 06/05/2005

From the Developer of GrabIt:

Quote: After working for free on GrabIt for the past 5 years I have now reached a point where I have had enough of all my free time going into this project and not getting anything out of it. But instead of letting everything go to waste, I decided to turn everything around and start charging money for the extra's services I can provide outside of the GrabIt application.

To be more concrete:

* Shemes.com will become a real company with a real support staff starting this weekend;
* A new USENET News Server will be introduced this weekend. This service is being maintained by the best professionals in the business. Almost every large USENET News Server in the world is running on the software that this company created;
* The GrabIt Search will become a paid service starting as soon as I have 1.5.3 ready for release. The GrabIt Search Engine already indexes the USENET News Server mentioned above. This means that everything you can find on the GrabIt Search can be downloaded from the Shemes.com USENET News Service;
* The GrabIt binary downloader will remain freeware, but will be improved rapidly with the extra time and money spend on Shemes.com.

I know this will shock a lot of you, but let me give a brief history to make you see things through my eyes:

Since 1999 GrabIt has been a hobby project. And even though I got a huge kick out the positive feedback from all of you, it has cost me more time than most people can imagine. Especially last year was really bad and I missed a lot of sleep while getting releases 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 ready for release. I worked on the search engine every free hour I got for almost 2 months before it was ready. And for the last 33 weeks I have spend at least an hours every evening to do maintenance on the search engine. All this besides working on GrabIt release 1.5.2 and 1.5.3, answering support e-mails and doing my day-time job which cost me 10 hours a day, 5 times a week. This doesn't leave a lot of room for family, friends, fun or any other form of social live.

Making this a commercial project gives me the opportunity to spend less time at work and more on this project, so in the end it should be better for all of us. After all, if you already like GrabIt now, just imagine what will happen if I actually start spending some serious time on it!

As always: Happy Grabbing!

Ilan Shemes

I think he made mention awile back that if he got a decent offer he would sell it so its not really a suprise that hes taken this step especially regarding the Seach function. Im glad that its been kept free this long with just ads on his site although it would be nice if it sayed that way although I give him all the props he deserves as it still remains a great app especially for ease of use and a great starting point for anyone starting out with Usenet as it was my first Usenet app also...

I can fully understand why he's doing this.

Not gonna use the shareware version because I never use the Grabit Search option.

It's good that we will see more updates now ;)

I got no problem with this either.
The client is still free for download and use so it's cool.


And thanks for fixing my message :D
I noticed that the [Quote]tags messed up the portal.