RE-VISIT - commercial marketplace
I just read a long old thread that was locked about this topic. BusinessDad said a lot of good stuff.
I think VanillaForums is making a huuuuge mistake by not providing a central, front facing repository with plugins/themes similar to the wordpress model.
REQUIREMENTS
Rating system with user reviews
Sorting plugins by ratings, downloads, etc
Ability to charge commercially
Simple built in support system for the plugin (like wordpress model).
ETC ETC ETC
The #1 thing that stops me from using plugins is the fear of becoming dependent on the plugin and then having the plugin go away. Ive been burned by this so many times, over so many years running forums.
I REALLY want to use some cool plugins. But I just have no confidence they will stick around because the developer has no incentive to keep doing work for free.
I hate being stuck with just a really really really basic boring forum because I fear using cool plugins.
This repository can have all the free plugins + the ability to charge for premium versions.
I would be thrilled to pay $1-$10 for a plugin because it gives me some confidence the developer is going to stick around with the $$$ incentive.
The pay for support model idea is completely flawed IMO. I dont want some one off hack fix by a developer. What happens with the next release? I need a plugin that I know is going to live on for a long time where a developer keeps making $$$ for every download. Wordpress has proven this works.
Someone COULD build this marketplace externally, but it really needs to live RIGHT HERE where it will get max exposure and make the developers the most $$$.
I know WP is a lot bigger, but there are people making a really good living working full time on a single popular plugin.
How many Vanilla installs exist world wide?????
I see plugins with 20,000 downloads here. I think a lot of people would gladly pay just a tiny $1 for a nice plugin that is easy to use and supported. The developer could make a few thousand bucks.
This could entice people to make more really slick plugins for Vanilla and really explode the platform.
The problem is there is a completely missing incentive system. There needs to be a marketplace RIGHT HERE for this to happen.
Is there a community voting mechanism for what should go into the next vanilla release? Id campaign for this endlessly 
Comments
I wish this were a thing also. I've even tried crowd-funding a plugin I'd love for my community to no avail.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't seem like the userbase is there for it to make sense financially.
Anyone know how many vanilla forum installs exist in the world?
Vanilla 2.2rc1 has 842,400 downloads, but seems hard to know how many installs there are.
This site shows 2100+ vanilla sites. Seems LOW.
http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Vanilla-Forums
35K for vbulletin. This CANT be right.
Selling a plugin for $10 does not give me an incentive to stick around. I get $10 once and then endless support requests because "I paid for this plugin!"
Anyway, I think it would be great if something like this was made. Start building it and I will help: https://github.com/vanilla/community
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That's a great point! People feel entitled as soon as they pay, even if it's $1.
That's exactly what is on this site.
I'm not aware of any paid marketplace system being supported by WordPress directly. Their directory is free downloads as well. I can safely say we will never support a paid distribution system on this site; we don't believe it is in our interest to manage or facilitate such a system.
I'm very much in agreement about a voting system, especially for compatibility information, a la wordpress.org.
There is. It's called a pull request.
For what it's worth, we do have an auto-updater for the staff-managed addons on the roadmap.
For what it's worth?
It's worth a whole lot! Everything you guys (upstream devs and addon devs) do have tremendous value to us out here. We haven't lost the spirit nor the energy here. I hope you'all know that!
There could definitely be a more cohesive way to "do" the addons and developer community aspects here. Dunno, maybe you should host some Vanilla conferences and try to get a crowd of globally distributed vanilla-upstream developers going on? Also Including finding a good way to give incentives to developers to stay somehow and maybe also somehow monetizing value added addon projects and themes!
Well I'm talking as an end user and hardly a developer myself.
I've written some suggestions for improving the addons repository here earlier. Not much was said in that topic, and I guess it was all a very tall order. http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/30680/plugins-repository-suggestions-for-improvements