Comment by mxkopy

The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.

It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.