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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pickin_grinnin" data-source="post: 7662617" data-attributes="member: 6697674">I love HeroLab, and use it constantly.Based on that and the tantalizing videos about RealmWorks, I bought it about a year ago.  I was excited about it at first, but then made the decision to stop using it when I realized that there was no way for me to pull my data back out of the program.  Without printing capability or the ability to run SQL queries on the database, I just can't justify the work and effort it will take to put a lot of content into it.  I have been burned too many times by software companies going out of business or abandoning a product and having my data locked up.Lone Wolf says that if they ever go out of business they will make sure to unlock the data for everyone, but I've been burned by promises like that, too.  When companies go out of business - or abandon products - they rarely take the time to do a lot of work for their existing customers if they can't earn money on it.  Talk is cheap.With this particular product they have also made a lot of promises regarding features (starting with the Kickstarter) that still haven't been implemented, and probably won't be anytime in the near future.  After their survey they indicated that printing was not going to be their priority, so when they say it's "on their list" there is a good chance that they mean "sometime in the next few years" (judging by the extreme slowness of their feature development in general).I don't know the folks there, but as a former software developer I have a strong suspicion that they have bitten off more than they can chew.  They have moved at a snail's pace when it comes to introducing features they promised long ago, which tells me they either don't have enough programmers working on the product, or those folks are splitting their time between RealmWorks and HeroLab.  They keep promising that their new "market" will open up soon, and are now talking more about a website version, but they haven't even brought the existing paid version up to speed yet.  I don't know if that reflects monetary desperation or a lack of business focus, but it's not a good sign.Don't get me wrong - I like their idea for the software and a lot of the features in it, and would love to see the product get better.  Right now, though, it's still like something that is in the beta phase of development, and I don't see the commitment of time being put into it to fix the existing issues and give it the basic functionality that has been promised all along.  That's just not a professional way to do things.   The money I spent on the product is essentially lost money (it's my biggest software purchase regret in at least a decade), so I'm sure not going to spend more to keep it connected to their servers on the off chance that it will be useful to me in a couple of years.I wish them luck, and would return to using the product if they ever get it up to speed, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.  They seem like a nice group of people with good ideas, but that doesn't mean they are good businesspeople.I'm not posting this to be mean.  I just think that potential customers need to be aware of what they are and aren't getting, and need to understand that "upcoming features" might mean "coming in a few years."</blockquote>

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