Going against the trend isn’t always a bad thing…
Let me ask you this then… How often do you see X-Pressive on this forum answering questions? Have you not seen numerous complaints that it takes a very long time to get email responses to support questions and issues? I own all candy products, particle, widget and text and guess what… I use none. Not saying they’re bad products but without developers long term commitment I can’t rely on these components to build my product. That’s what you get when your business model does not ensure ongoing cash flow. You inevitably find yourself having to find paying work elsewhere.
My point above regarding prices being perhaps even too low was precisely coming from this angle. I just don’t want to invest my money and time in learning how to use yet another component that will go out of support because it’s developer didn’t make enough on it and had to shift attention elsewhere to pay the bills.
Hope this helps clarify where I’m coming from. You don’t need to agree with anything we say here but I would kindly suggest you think twice before insulting another fellow dev trying to make a living by calling his offering a ripoff.
There is a 50% off sale right now. We are not trying to rip anyone off here. Right now our plugins are the lowest source of income, but that isn’t the thing that bothers us, it’s the percieved lack of interest and comments like this.
Like Igemar said, with the things exposed to us by Corona, this was our only means of protecting against piracy.
We are not even going to bother auguring the toss with you on this, as others in this thread have already stated the points just as well as we could have.
However, lets do one example. Lets say for example that a plugin took the 10 hours to make per platform. So 20 hours total, you charge say 60 bucks an hour. So 20 × 60 = 1200. Are their any plugins on our site for anywhere near that? No.
Unfortunately, the haters such as yourself seem to be outweighing the people who don’t expect everything for nothing. Which is a real shame, as we have put literally hundreds upon hundreds of hours into these plugins and the infrastructure, and had big plans to make tons of plugins available to you all.
So overall I find your rip off statement very hurtful. If anything, we are the ones who have been ripped off to date, as we haven’t even begun to recoup our costs for making all of these plugins.
Also note, the Amazon ads plugin was not develeoped by Gremlin Interactive and thus, the price was not set by us.
Take this aa you will.
I’m not insulting anyone - just stating my opinion I have about Gremlin’s pricing. As a customer in the plugin market, I don’t like the business model of paying per app. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
However, lets do one example. Lets say for example that a plugin took the 10 hours to make per platform. So 20 hours total, you charge say 60 bucks an hour. So 20 × 60 = 1200. Are their any plugins on our site for anywhere near that? No.
If you charged $20 flat rate for your plugin, that’s 60 sales and you’ve recouped your cost. Every sale after that is pure profit. So not sure where the 1200 dollar price tag a plugin is coming from?
Unfortunately, the haters such as yourself seem to be outweighing the people who don’t expect everything for nothing. Which is a real shame, as we have put literally hundreds upon hundreds of hours into these plugins and the infrastructure, and had big plans to make tons of plugins available to you all.
So overall I find your rip off statement very hurtful. If anything, we are the ones who have been ripped off to date, as we haven’t even begun to recoup our costs for making all of these plugins.
For heavens sake, not sure why people are getting so upset here and taking it personal. I’m not being a hater. I’m being a CONSUMER. And as a consumer, I’m looking for the best product at the best price.
From what you said, it sounds like the “haters” are outweighting the “people who don’t expect everything for nothing.” If I can infer from this statement, it sounds like you don’t have that many sales. Which means one of two things:
-
There is no demand for your plugin
-
There is demand, but your pricing is wrong
I would assume that there is at least some demand for the Amazon Ads plugin, so that leaves option number 2.
Even if you charged $50, or $100 one time fee, I’d consider it. I’m not expecting everything for nothing. But I won’t pay to reuse the same thing for each and every app I make. As far as fighting piracy goes, you could still have your licensing done on a per app basis, but you don’t need to charge on a per app basis.
Thank you for offering your plugins, but I won’t be buying them based on your pricing.
Once again, I’d love to see Corona release an Amazon Ads plugin similar to their Admob plugin, or some other companies offering some competition to square up the existing pricing. Monopolies aren’t good for consumers. Competition is great for consumers. Quality goes up, and prices go down.
We are not even going to bother auguring the toss with you on this, as others in this thread have already stated the points just as well as we could have.
I wish you would. I’d like to have an open dialog about it.
Out of interest, what would a fair price be then? Given the price it’s at now, in the sale, i doubt that anyone but amazon would offer it any cheaper. It wouldn’t be worth the effort.
This is the whole problem really, you can’t make everyone happy. If we removed the per app restriction tomorrow, then everyone would be complaining that the pice is too high still (if it’s higher than free, someone will feel they have some divine right not to pay anything) or existing customers would be unhappy or x + y.
We could even make them free, and just put a button on our site to accept donations for our efforts. I would be surprised if that monthly total raised more than a cup of coffee a month however.
At the end of the day, even if Corona were to open it’s own store, there are bound to be licensing limits imposed on things, so you might then have to pay for a plugin yearly. That would also probably be deemed unacceptable by many.
It’s a shame to see that fellow developers are now getting into the mindset of our customers, who expect everything for free. I am not specifically talking about my business here. I see it everywhere. This race to the bottom is preventing anyone without a huge bankroll from starting a business these days, which is saddening.
Edit: this isn’t aimed at you particularly either, just a general moan on how the apparent demand for plugins initially has outweighed the real demand for them (because they are paid for products)
Cheers
Out of interest, what would a fair price be then? Given the price it’s at now, in the sale, i doubt that anyone but amazon would offer it any cheaper. It wouldn’t be worth the effort.
I’d happily pay $50 bucks for the Amazon Ads plugin if it did not have a per app price tag.
This is the whole problem really, you can’t make everyone happy. If we removed the per app restriction tomorrow, then everyone would be complaining that the pice is too high still (if it’s higher than free, someone will feel they have some divine right not to pay anything) or existing customers would be unhappy or x + y.
I wouldn’t be complaining if it was a flat fee like $50. If it was say $200 dollars then I don’t think I would buy.
I don’t know what your sales look like, so maybe I’m alone here. But if you aren’t getting sales, I’d seriously consider rethinking your pricing.
As far as setting a price in general, it has to be balanced with demand, competition, and the ability of your customer to actually make the product themselves. Every consumer is going to want the lowest price possible, even all the way down to free if they can get it.
For example, instead of paying money to buy a plugin, I would consider just writing it myself. However, my barrier to entry is paying corona 200$ a month to get Enterprise (which I’m not willing to do at this point), and learning how to write a plugin. So here I am shopping for a plugin, but I’m also not willing to pay per app for it so now I’m stuck without the functionality I want.
For myself, I don’t see it as a race to the bottom… I see it as product placement and market demand. If nobody is willing to buy plugins, maybe there just isn’t a market for it. I don’t think that is the case here, I just think this pricing model doesn’t resonate with your potential customer base such as myself. It can be hard to find the sweet spot, but that is the challenge of business I think.
Good post, much better. This is the sort of feedback we were looking for.
Lets see what we can do here. We will look into offering the plugins without enforcing an app tier. No promise’s, but we will look into it. We didn’t want to have app limits and such initially either, for the record.
Thanks for the informative feedback
Just my two pennies here, but I can see a subscription plan being useful for this situation.
Pay X and get access to a plugin and support for 12 months, then after that you are free to continue using the plugin but if you want updates and support you need to pay for another 12 months.
No idea if your infrastructure supports this or not though. This seems like the sort of thing that an actual marketplace would sort out, being able to list plugins on there and have various business models available, anything from pay-what-you-want pricing to per-app and subscriptions based. All taken care of by the marketplace so individual sellers don’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts of it all.
Yes I agree.
If you think about it, selling plugins is much like selling apps. Paying $1 - $100 (or whatever price you figure out brings in the most revenue for you, price * number of units sold) for a plugin makes sense. And in this case, working 20 hours and getting a price tag like that sounds pretty darn good to me! I work hundreds of hours on my apps and have to give them away for free, which is why I’m looking for advertising plugins in the first place lol
I also apologize for calling you a ‘hater’. I’m just like you guys, single guy working on a bazillion things at once trying to make a living to support my fiancee and little girl, calling me ‘evil’ just hit a sour spot 
No hard feelings.
I’m not saying that the per-app pricing is evil, and I completely see why you would do it. I personally would have no problem paying per app. As others have said before, if your app can’t pull in the purchase price from adverts then you have bigger problems.
While this is being discussed, I ask that everyone remain civil and professional.
Rob
@Gremlin, it might be a stupid idea, but why not taking your plugin to Corona directly? The way i see it, it is a win-win situation : you get paid by Corona a fee (depending on usage/adoption) to offer the plugin for free, Corona benefits from one new (and really necessary) monetization option.
We all know that it is quite hard to live properly on app development at the moment. To me, any new plugin that requires extra cash out of my pocket will go through a much deeper thinking process before adoption. Main reasons would be : Is this going to pay back the investment? Is this going to be easily implemented? and Is this going to be supported on the long run? (what if it breaks and no one is there anymore to fix it).
Now if Corona offers this in the package, i will try it, and most likely adopt it if the quality is here. Corona SDK has always been lacking ads options. It is getting better, but we constantly hear about this *new-ad-network* that performs so well, and are unable to use unfortunately… Out of all the ad monetization available to us, i tried most of them, and i know only of 3 that work and pay properly (iads, admob, vungle if you wonder). Nothing for Amazon : Corona is failing here, they do have a need for it. You have the fix for them. They would be stupid not to go for it.
End of the day, the way it is now, the chance that i try the plugin are very low compare to a plugin offered for free. Which drives me to a second point if dealing directly with Corona is not an option: You may want to offer the plugin for 1 app for free, so devs can try it out. If they realize it works well and that the support is here, that they could easily implement and that it paid off properly, the will buy the licence for their future apps. I know i would.
On a side note, @Ingemar :
QUOTE : Personally I don’t think CoronaLabs should develop plugins. They should concentrate on making the core the best there is. They’ve already provided us with the plugin framework which enables us to write plugins. What’s missing is a marketplace which I hope will become available soon, because competition *is* a good thing. I just hope that it doesn’t become another race-to-the-bottom with pricing, where quality usually suffers.
I do think the exact opposite, in a way =) And for the exact reason that you mention : We will end up with a marketplace filled with low quality products, with low adoption as there will be a price barrier. I would largely prefer that Corona deals directly with plugin developers to incorporate their plugins, and ensure a high level of quality, pay them accordingly and offers their plugins for free. More stability for the plugin devs -> More quality + better following up/updates -> happier customers.
Corona SDK sells itself as THE cross-platform engine. Great. But then, it is their responsibility to make sure that all is cross-platform, and that includes the main ad networks. Put it another way : Would it seem normal to you now to go back to pay the plugin for iAds, for AdMob, for using IAP’s, Zip, Flurry, etc? (I know i would be gone in a second). Do you want a product which is only a core and then you have to pay for anything extra? I know i don’t. I want a one time fee and a complete freedom into using any thing i want in the future, a complete solution (where i pick what i want to use by declaring in the buid.settings), an ALL-INCLUSIVE, truly cross-platform. I do understand that it may be hard for them to do “in-house”, and this is where dealing with extermal plugin devs make a lot of sense : they keep having great plugins for cheaper than developed in-house and they can really offer the full cross-platform experience (and their main selling point, let’s not kid ourselves).
[background=#f7fbfc]… I do understand that it may be hard for them to do “in-house”, and this is where dealing with extermal plugin devs make a lot of sense : they keep having great plugins for cheaper than developed in-house and they can really offer the full cross-platform experience…[/background]
This is an evolution of what I was thinking and has the same consequence: CoronaLabs support the developers but don’t need to develop the plugins themselves in-house. It would also, as you say, promote higher quality plugins. I’m wondering though if CoronaLabs is willing to do this.
Ok, so here is the new deal everyone:
New Customers: There is no more ‘app limit’, meaning that you buy the plugin as a one off purchase and can use it in as many apps as you like. We still register your apps on our servers however, to ensure everyone complies with our licensing. If we find any instances of ‘sharing’ we will ban you and lock your account, and your license will no longer be valid.
Existing customers: Same deal applies as above.
Thanks
Oh my :o !
And the price point has also changed dramatically. Everyone can afford this now!
Yeah, we have been as flexible as we possibly can and made this affordable for everyone. I hope this will be the start of increased activity and less arguments and such from the community. We are trying to help everyone here!
Cheers :>
It is affordable,but I have corona starter ,So I cannot use the plugin
I hope this results in higher sales volume = more revenue for you and your partners.
Well done Gremlin! This is exactly what I am looking for! I hope that this will be a win-win situation for both you and your customers