I’m looking for a reseller for my upcoming plugins. I love writing code but hate the business stuff so I’m not going to set up my own shop. Instead I’m looking for someone who already have the practical know how of commerce, taxes etc so I can concentrate on what I’m good at.
I am currently more or less finished with two quite small plugins that I think could be sold for 5 USD and 10 USD but there are many more plugins planned. I’m thinking the plugins should have a trial period and then be locked unless the user buys them.
An absolute requirement is that the reseller already has a functioning and documented licensing API that I can implement in my projects. I am not interested in inventing a new system from scratch and I wont guess how an undocumented and by design untestable API is supposed to be used.
Is anyone here a reseller or know of one? (Please don’t mention the Extension Warehouse; it does NOT fulfill the requirement stated above.)
Why does the extention warehouse doesn’t fit your needs? I know the EW isn’t perfect, but doing it all yourself is’t that easy. We implemented licensing, security and sales before the EW had these features.
I’m not aware of a reseller offering all this. We have the knowledge to do it, but at this moment we only have implemented all this for Skalp and it take some time to make it more general so the system can be used with other plugins.
The built in licensing API has no proper documentation so I would have to guess how to use it. The return values of the individual methods are documented but not how the methods are supposed to be used.
E.g. do I need to create a dialog myself telling the trial has expired with a big friendly button to open the Extension Warehouse where people can buy it or does SketchUp already do that? Should I implement the days_remaining method to tell users how many days remains or is this built into SketchUp?
This API is also by design untestable since you can’ have a license for your own extension. Just to test the API to figure out e.g. what happens when the trial expires I would need the extension to pass the review and be publicly available, register a new account by another email and buy my own plugin.
Gumroad and DPD both have some great features for selling your products. I chose DPD and have been very happy with them. They have an API which I THINK you could tap into to check user licenses but I’m not using it myself for that. I developed my own license system which is a lot of work to maintain but gives me the flexibility I need.
Gumroad also has an API for generating and validating license keys. It looks like a good system too but DPD was better for my needs.
I don’t think you’ll find any resellers that will help you implement a license management system, but I could be wrong. Best of luck! I’m looking forward to seeing what you have in store for the SU community!
But as @Whaat and @Guy , I built my own licensing system. It took quite some time, but it was worth it, it hasn’t been cracked for now, and I can have any embedded information I need.
Many ready-made licensing systems have been cracked, so software that implement them get cracked pretty quickly.
Regarding resellers, I’ve never heard of one that offers a licensing API. Usually their job is only marketing and selling. They are not software developers.