Commercial Add-Ons: Worth it or Worthless? Part 1
So, we're developing BetterWorkflow (as we may have mentioned 500 times already), and when looking at the challenges in front of us, re: third party add-on integration, we are facing the question "is there really enough justification to spend a gillion pounds on development hours for something that may only sell 10 copies?"
Update: See Part 2 of this article.
Hot on the heels of John D Wells' article about the principles of Commercial add-on development, the team here were wondering what actual commercial potential there is in the world of EE add-ons?
When trying to do any sort of realistic projection of cost estimates, it would be good to have some figures, some raw data, to give us an empirical base on which to estimate potential profit/loss for the development costs. How many licenses have ExpressionEngine sold this year? How many EE2 licenses have they sold in total since it's release? These two nuggets of information would be excellent starters for estimating your potential client base. But for some reason, EllisLab have kept schtum on the matter. There are massive websites out there that use ExpressionEngine, that's a fact, but we could be spending 800 hours of time on development and targeting a base of only 1000 websites, of which only a handful may want the functionality we provide in our add-on.
So, we know EllisLab are quiet on this front, for whatever reason, so we thought, let's approach add-on developers themselves? Hopefully that's where you (if you're reading this and have made a commercial addon of course) come in. Below is a survey we've knocked up in Wufoo with a few questions about addon development. (Survey is now closed, thanks for all your responses)
Additionally, we've sent out an email to Ryan Masuga at Devot-ee to see if he will divulge any anonymous statistics too, so hopefully we can either write a followup post full of interesting stats relating to commercial addons, or a post where we lament the 'secrecy' that seems to be surround the EE community when it actually comes down to hard numbers. We hope for the former, and that the information we gather will be of interest to anyone currently developing or thinking about doing so.
6 comments
John Macpherson
Really look forward to seeing the results of this. Hopefully a lot of the add on guys will respond.
Ian Ebden
It’s tricky because we’ve been encouraged in the past to start charging for add-ons to improve (in theory) add-on quality and support. Recently there’s been some negativity about prices or even charging at all, so we’re almost back to square one. Commercial add-ons are essential in my opinion, in much the same way that EE is commercially licensed. You’re kind of buying peace of mind I guess, knowing chances are it’s a solid add-on with decent ongoing support.
Billy (@fiazk)
I would also be very interested in the results. I have many plugins that I have thought about making them ready for commercial release. The single thing that has stopped me is the very question you are trying to answer… :)
Shine
Yo should get in touch with Levi Graham and get him to point you to his slides from EECI Leiden last year.
The general impression I got was that only the “must have” add-ons like his Better Meta that have very wide application are likely to be highly profitable., and these need to be super-simple to avoid all the profit being drained in support time.
Other than that they’re most useful to just show you know how to bend EE to your will if clients are worried about feature matching with other systems.
My own opinion is that we’ll happily pay for add-ons on the basis that it’ll be cheaper than spending our own time to develop them, but that commercial add-ons also need an appropriate level of support.
The existence of a well supported, commercial add-on market is what both keeps EE up with other products AND then sets it apart from some of the shonky code that regularly brings down other CMS sites.
Sure, some of the add-ons I use on every project I’d like to see in the core, but $300 is only expensive when compared to free products WITHOUT support. Anyone seen the price of a Wordpress support contract recently?
Community supported is all very well for hobby projects, but I wouldn’t let my business depend on it, nor recommend that any clients do either.
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