Is there a market for commercial plugins and themes?

superrune

I for one would love to see an "app store" integrated into Vanilla, where I could buy the premium plugin-features available for vanillaforums.com users - or other plugins made by the developers on this site...

x00

@businessdad said:
DirtyDog That's the reason, yes. I made some free ones, but I also sell others, and the Addon section contains only free contributions.

That's not entirely true. This isn't wordpress which restricts more. You could operate the freemuium model, SaaS, or whatever.

I understand though you want to protect the code, though that isn't their responsibility.

I think they are doing just fine, people are expecting too much too soon. Not allowing time. Watch this space.

x00

You have to be intelligent about it, that is business. You can't expect people to do all the work for you to make money.

businessdad

I'm already operating my shop, my post is a few months old now. If there is something I never expect is that somebody does the work for me. I was simply pointing out a limitation, but, of course, one can work around it, as I did.

422

we get emails daily for custom one off designs.

yesterday a guy emailed, wanted a complete custom design. i gave him two options, :

1. entire design, circa $750

2. pay hourly at $55 min 10 hours work.

he replied, no THANKS , I will buy vbulletin. so the upshot, for repetitive sales on a free product ( vanilla ) keep pricing at around $5

businessdad

@422 said:
the upshot, for repetitive sales on a free product ( vanilla ) keep pricing at around $5

Nice to have you back, @422. I actually mentioned you and your $5 themes in one of my earlier replies. As I wrote, if I had to sell what I make for $5, I would abandon the idea immediately, as I would have to close over 500 sales for each week of work just to break even with the costs (without even factoring in support, which should always be provided for any product).
Fortunately, not all clients have such a tiny budget, which allowed me to close several sales already.

422

yup, was checking out your plugins on your site. Good Luck. Ste

vrijvlinder

if I had to sell what I make for $5, I would abandon the idea immediately

Imagine selling it for cents on the dollar. That is what I tell people who are looking for a record deal . The idea is volume sales which can only be achieved by setting a bottom price for the distributor.

I think support should be an extra cost. Like most companies, they charge extra for extended support. If you don't set a limit when does your responsibility end?

And I don't mean updates, I mean actual tech support. That is extra. Or set up a knowledge base so people can help each other solve problems.

Fortunately, not all clients have such a tiny budget, which allowed me to close several sales already.

In your case you work with people directly tailoring to their needs. Each different budget and all. Themes are as disposable as music and easily ripped. To make them more desirable a low affordable price works well. I go back to itunes store model. People did not think it would work, selling songs for one dollar. But it worked and it has generated tons of sales for independent musicians as well as record labels.

If I could sell a theme for one dollar and 5000 people payed one dollar , well that would certainly make up for my time in making it. The question is how and where do I distribute this to gain the maximum exposure to potential sales?

DirtyDog

@vrijvlinder said:
If I could sell a theme for one dollar and 5000 people payed one dollar

You can't, which is why this won't work.

vrijvlinder

well thanks for the vote of confidence !

So what would you say would sell more, a song or a theme?

Or does it matter?

what matters is marketing, does not matter what you sell.

businessdad

@vrijvlinder said:
I think support should be an extra cost.
And I don't mean updates, I mean actual tech support. That is extra. Or set up a knowledge base so people can help each other solve problems.

I couldn't disagree more. The comparison with songs doesn't work. A song is a song. It plays, you either like it or not. A song doesn't break your CD player, it doesn't damage your other albums.
Software, on the other hand, can contain many issues (compatibility, bugs, and so on) and they must be addressed.
A Software Developer who charges for fixing bugs in his own software is ridiculous at best. As I explained elsewhere, such model gives developers all the reasons to "throw something" on the market, as bad as it can be, and charge Clients to make it work. It may seem an exaggerated statement, but I met this kind of crooks personally.

Dumping Support it on Clients' shoulders is even more unprofessional. It's already bad enough when someone has the cheek of saying "I gave it to you for free, you can't expect much support", it becomes absolutely unacceptable if there is money involved. A Community is a great thing as an addition to a company's Support Team, but it cannot be seen as a complete replacement.

Like most companies, they charge extra for extended support.

This makes more sense, but it's important to clarify that "extended support" doesn't mean "all support is an extra cost". The vast majority of software providers offers a period of free support with every purchase. If they deliver something flawless, that's great: they don't have to provide support, no extra work. If they worked poorly, they have to work extra to correct what's wrong, which just makes sense.

If you don't set a limit when does your responsibility end?

I never said one should provide unlimited support. I provide free support for an initial period to my clients, and it covers bug fixes and installation issues. This is the very minimum one should give the Clients, not something like "software provided as-is, if it doesn't work pay me huge $$$ to fix it". Obviously, customisations, new features and external issues incur extra charges, at full hourly rate.

By the way, that applies to themes as well. If a theme breaks on IE, I expect the creator to fix it free of charge, or to refund my money (unless he clearly specified that compatibility was not guaranteed, in which case I would never have purchased it). If you think of your products as cheap, disposable items to be mass produced, the quality will be poor.

DirtyDog

@vrijvlinder it has nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with reality. Peoples taste in design differs. You are never going to get 5,000 people to buy one theme for this forum software. This is a niche software package, not an Iphone with tens of millions of users. Further, your marketing budget (and time equals money) for one dollar themes will be a negative amount if you plan to turn a profit.

businessdad

@422 said:
yup, was checking out your plugins on your site. Good Luck. Ste

Thanks. So far it's not going too bad. Interestingly, the dearer plugins are the ones I sell more often. It's encouraging, to see that efforts are appreciated.

vrijvlinder

If you think of your products as cheap, disposable items to be mass produced, the quality will be poor.

How can thinking be converted into fact? But I don't think the products are disposable, I see it in action when people steal and don't think it's wrong. Being able to steal intellectual content has devalued it. So people do not see the real value.

In order to compete with mass production you have to make it available inexpensive so the loss for them is not so big if they don't like it. That is the hook. It is good and won't break the bank.

but it's important to clarify that "extended support" doesn't mean "all support

yea I did not mean all support, I mean perpetual support beyond updates and upgrades to the product itself.

A Software Developer who charges for fixing bugs in his own software is ridiculous at best.

Or creates a problem just so people buy the product aka antivirus, and such

vrijvlinder

@DirtyDog yea I don't intend to sell my Vanilla themes even if they offered to buy them, I donated them, I understand what you say, I just don't keep the word impossible in my dictionary....

businessdad

@DirtyDog said:
You are never going to get 5,000 people to buy one theme for this forum software. This is a niche software package, not an Iphone with tens of millions of users. Further, your marketing budget (and time equals money) for one dollar themes will be a negative amount if you plan to turn a profit.

I agree completely. Such model would work with these huge communities, not with Vanilla.

To make a comparison, an Irish boy (12 y.o.) became famous for having produced a "game" (if you can call it so) for iPhone, which was downloaded by zillions of Users. Surely he did his best, but it's still something he made with GameSalad and very little knowledge of programming. I'm sure he didn't spend days with analysis, tweaking, coding, bug fixing and so on. He just made it, published it, bang. Huge community, tons of downloads (of course, his young age fed the hype as well).

Let's suppose that he got a million downloads (quite possible) and that he spent two full weeks of work in making is game. That would amount to a cost, in terms of time, of about one second of work for each download. If each one were sold for $0.50, he would have worked for about $1800 an hour.
Definitely doable, but not here.

Update
Out of curiosity, I checked the status of the game I mentioned. Its price is now $1.16 (conversion from Euro). Not bad, as a source of income.

hbf

@vrijvlinder said:
well thanks for the vote of confidence !

So what would you say would sell more, a song or a theme?

Or does it matter?

what matters is marketing, does not matter what you sell.

what you sell determines the size of the market, the marketing only allows you to position yourself within that market.

I doubt there are 5000 vanilla based forums out there looking for a similar theme. a song on the other hand... yeah, way bigger market there. Even terrible music stands a chance of finding a following given that nearly every human on earth listens to music.

vrijvlinder

@hbf said: what you sell determines the size of the market, the marketing only allows you to position yourself within that market.

yes indeed, however there have been many cases of things that nobody needs, like pet rocks, which a market was carved for them. Sometimes people don't know what they need or can be convinced to buy something needless using crafty marketing.

Even terrible music stands a chance of finding a following

oh I know and some of it is shameful hardly music.... it shows that when people don't know they will accept anything mass marketed to them. Arg!

I doubt there are 5000 vanilla based forums out there looking for a similar theme.

well with more than half a million users of this app, who knows for sure. A store would have to be made here for people to pawn their goods. That is the only way to know for sure. Granted music has been around a lot longer as a consumable good.
But that does not mean one can't create a market or make the market bigger.

hbf

Pet rocks fill a natural market for useless trinkets. There is a market for that stuff, chia pets, pet rocks, worry dolls, Chinese finger traps and endless array of useless crap is made to fill a market need. why does the market exist? that's a psychology question im not going to try to answer, but suffice it to say, people like to buy stuff, and they dont care if it has true utility, provided it gives them some moment of enjoyment.

you can't create a market for themes outside of the population of people who are already running vanilla forum software. people just wont install a forum software to get a $1 theme. ever.

you asked what would sell more, a theme or some music. i guarantee mediocre music would see an order of magnitude better sales than a great theme.

hbf

im not arguing against the need for a theme/plugin store. it's definitely needed. just don't delude yourself into thinking you're going to get rich off $1 downloads.

The right thing to do would be to create a plugin manager application that is accessible from the dashboard, you can shop for themes or plugins from there, select one you want, pay for it, it downloads, unpacks and installs the new plugin, and makes sure all the permissions are correct.

take all of the FTP and chmod bull out of the process. there are plenty of people trying to self host that dont know how to set permissions on a folder recursively via command line to make an addon manager very popular.