Now if I could just book me an appeareance on the Simpson's show...
Business banking is one of those topics that caused me dread. Business banking practices are notorious for penny-nickel-dime business to death. I really loathe the per activity charges that are prevalent for business checking on all national banks. I really took my time in doing research here. I stopped counting after I reached my 20th bank.
These were my requirements:
- No or low monthly
- No per activity charges
- No setup fees
- Unlimited deposits
- Unlimited withdrawals
- Free Bill Pay
- Free Online Banking
- Branch close to my location
- Friendly business hours
All the national banks failed the no activity charges requirement. I was surprised that there were only a handful of banks that offered free bill pay. All the banks that I contacted offered some form of online banking. Most free checking had limits on transactions per month.
In the end the local banks ruled. My three finalists were:
- Far West Bank
- First America Credit Union
- Bank of American Fork
And the winner was...
Bank of American Fork
Here's run down on my thoughts for each bank:
Far West Bank has branches all over the state of Utah. They have been very friendly at all the branches I've visited. I disqualified them because they only had a 200 limit on deposits and withdrawals (combined) a month. Their turn around time on deposits left much to be desired. I currently have my personal banking here, that's how I know about the deposits turn around.
First America Credit Union has the second best online experience that I have ever had. Their website is very well designed. Everything was at the locations on the screen that I expected. Their demos are superb. The one thing that turned me off to their business banking was the relatively high setup fee. This is a $148 one time charge. Their limit for transactions was MUCH higher than anywhere I contacted. They are open on Saturdays from 8 AM to 7 PM. WOW! I actually moved my personal banking accounts here.
Bank of American Fork is a very small local bank. They had absolutely NO FEES. I decided to go for the BizSmart account. This has a monthly fee of $7 if my balance falls down below $500. I can live with that! It took about an hour to setup my account, mostly because the guy that helped me had never setup a business account before. I was a bit disappointed when I checked the customer's online experience. I did like that they have a policy to make funds available immediately upon deposit. This setup seemed perfect for my cash strapped microISV. I only needed to show the state tax number, my Social Security, and a form of photo ID.
I will move my account to First America Credit Union, if Bank of American Fork proves to be a pain in the neck. Oh, and the number 1 bank in my opinion is Desert Schools Federal Credit Union (DSFCU) in Arizona. They have (in my opinion) the absolute best online experience. Their clerks are very well trained and very pleasant to deal with. I banked with them for about 7 years, and their clerks were always very fast with my transactions. Too bad they don't have a presence over here in Utah.
I have nothing but praise for .NET Reactor. It seems that I'm one of those customers that end up breaking software all the time. .NET Reactor was no different. My code caused some very strange reflection bugs at least a couple times. I sent them a sample program each time my code caused it to bomb. They fixed the program within a couple weeks each time.
The program now works as advertised. I'm to the point now where I'm going to include .NET Reactor as part of my build process. I will be using its command-line interface for this.
Eriziz updates .NET Reactor on a regular basis. This is a very good thing in this software space. This keeps hackers on their toes, which means one less thing that I have to worry about.
My next step from here is creating a 30-day trial, and setup an automated licensing system.
Here's a list of the tools that I use for both programming and maintaining my website:
Programming
.NET Libraries
Intallation
Databases
- SQL Server 2000
- SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
- SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition
- SQLite - http://www.sqlite.org
Graphics
Website
System Administration
Project Management
These tools are the ones I want to use, but for lack of funds, time, or knowledge, I haven't been able to incorporate into my practices:
I'm just amazed at the sheer number of programs that I'm using. I'm pretty sure I left out some, since I did this from memory. A couple of these are just way too expensive at this time. I'm hoping to purchase them with the proceeds of the sales from the first version of PainlessSVN. This is one of the few disadvantages of growning a company organically.
I have been making a habit to purchase applications and apps from microISVs. I also check the Business of Software forums and Larkware News for other microISVs for tools that could make my life easier.
After much thought and research, I've decided on how to price PainlessSVN. The price will be 49.95 USD. I will have a special introductory price of 29.95 USD for the first month after PainlessSVN is released.
I decided to avoid taking money before the 1.0 release. This will be my first product, and I want customers to have a good experience. This will also lower my stress levels. I don't have a set release date, other than sometime in September, barring any unforseen problems.
I will turn my attention to setting up the eCommerce stuff, once I get Beta 1 out the door. I have decided to use e-Junkie to handle payments and licensing. I will start with PayPal, then 2CheckOut, as I already have accounts for these already. I still haven't decided if I want to use Google Checkout as well.
This took a while to find out, especially since MSDN doesn't have this information. A kind soul on the Microsoft.Public.Management.MMC newsgroup pointed to the answer. His name is Larry Gillstrom. Thanks Larry!
Read on to see how this is done...
I had a few people that asked me to explain how to detect and download the .NET 2.0 framework. I got started with a snippet from a guy with Stucko as his handle on the Joel On Software forums. I tweaked it, added more code, until I got it working pretty good.
I'm giving the community an Inno Setup script that all it does is detect, download, and install .NET 2.0 if it doesn't find it. You will need to get Download DLL from http://www.istool.org/default.aspx/isx/isxdl, then change the path to isxdl.dll under the [Files] section. Read more to see the code to do this, or download the zip file.
Just giving back to the community that has helped me so much...
