About (2) I think programmers don't buy development tools any more. They use open source or maybe free tools. Only Microsoft might still be able to have people pay for Visual Studio (but that's because they own Windows).

Either your project should be open source or it should be aimed at non-programmers like finance or accounting people.

I think the best plan might be to create an open source tool first and then, when the product start to be good enough, sell special packages around it for finance/accounting.