I bought Cockos’s Reaper today, because:

a) It’s really good.

b) The non-commercial license is really cheap (?30-ish). The commercial licence is not exactly expensive, but more than I could pay right now. I like the fact that they recognise that the majority of people using software of this sort aren’t making any money out of it, and offer it to those people at a fair price. In fact, the majority of people using software of this sort are using warezed copies of Cubase and Reason, because the full versions are unaffordable and the affordable versions are pointlessly crippled (Ableton Lite, I’m looking at you).

c) The software is totally usable with all features enabled forever even if you don’t pay. You pay because you like the software and want to pay for it, not because it’s the only way to “unlock” it (see previous point about pointless crippling of software just to enforce a licencing model). I like being told politely what the conditions of use of a program are (evaluate for 30 days, then please pay for it if you continue using it). I don’t like being dicked around with copy-protection schemes and licences you have to ring people up to transfer from one computer to another.

That’s the right way to do it. And, as I said, Reaper’s a really good piece of software, with some very nifty signal routing features too.