I always wondered how NI and Ableton are still in business, given their relatively simple copy protection. Seems like reach and online requiremements is key to success. If you reach a million users, you are fine with only 20% paying customers because 200,000 paying users is still a huge base to keep your business alive, especially if you have dozens of products to offer, all based on the same technology.
However, reach alone doesn’t earn you a penny. It needs to be actually reached out to on a regular basis. There is a good reason why the majority of staff in service sector businesses is marketing and sales. This is almost impossible to pull of as a one man show. Once you have reach however, you can team up with others and eventually make it a fulltime job.
I may be wrong, but with only a few thousand users and going it alone, you’ll probably give up at some point, unless it’s only a side hustle for you anyway.
So as a start to get some reach, why not do a Freemium? Reach is growing fast with the free (guilt free) version and that proportionally grows the 10-20% share or so that buys an upgrade/bonus features. Email the base with a discount offer every now and then and some % will make the switch. There is probably less of an incentive for crackers to spend time on a product that is mostly available for free anyway.