20 Responses, some tweets and emails later, we're back with our findings...

We've had some great feedback (and responses) from the community regarding the commercial add-on scene and while we didn't get a thousands of responses to our survey, we did get enough to raise, at the very least, some interesting discussion points.

Money money money

Let's start with the responses to our question 'Have you recouped your development costs?'. This is something we've become very conscious of whilst developing Better Workflow. BWF was something we started because our clients needed it, something to 'scratch our own itch'. However, with the intricacies of third-party add-on support, BWF is causing a lot of headaches about whether we can afford to pay the hours of development needed to complete certain features. Out of our responders, how many have actually recouped their costs?

From the small number of responses we received, we can say that some people have recouped their costs, so it's not totally financially fruitless, but, as I think we all realised, not exactly a cash cow! For more information on the commercial side we asked Ryan Masuga of Devot-ee about sales figures and while he wasn't specific about numbers, it's clear lots of people are buying add-ons from Devot-ee: "We sell many add-ons developed by numerous different developers from all over the world, every month. I'm happy doing what I'm doing."

Support is key

How about add-on support? The general feeling we've got from the community is that great support is incredibly important for the continuing success of an add-on, be it £10 or £100. But how much time will a budding add-on developer be spending on support?

As you can see, once your add-on starts getting popular, support starts getting popular too! If you are serious about creating a great add-on, careful consideration has to be made about how you will offer support. Do you assign an hour a day to tickets, do you use Tender or Get Satisfaction, or straight up e-mail? This is something that we are still mulling over, any thoughts would be very welcome in the comments.

Repeat performance

So the money isn't amazingly good, and the support hours can be massive if you're actually successful, so why are people still making commercial add-ons?

Over to Low aka Lodewijk Schutte: "For me, building something that is my own makes it worth it. If you want money, do client work or be @brandonkelly."

And I think that's the key point here, while there definitely is scope for commercial add-on development to make money, the real motivator, the real drive shouldn't be financial. If you're thinking of building an add-on, build it because you're interested in it, or you need it, or you have an itch you just want to scratch. Then if it gets popular, brilliant, that's a nice problem to have! Something we should remember is that while ExpressionEngine for the client is a nice powerful CMS tool, ExpressionEngine for the developers, for the people who build it, for the people who create the custom add-ons, well, it's a community. Good ideas, good code, good support first, finances second.

Survey comments

"It's not especially lucrative, but it's fun, gives you freedom and it's a different type of development. Plus a lot of my addons have come from filling a need for a client's EE site."

"Quality dev and support is key. You may also get more web work from a good addon as well as press and brand exposure."

"You need a "Depends" option on the final question. If sales continue at a steady pace then we'd be more likely to develop more add-ons."

"It's only worth it if a) the product is very useful to you and your core business and b) you can leverage your addon sales into more sales in other parts of your business: doing customizations, etc."

"I would do it again because the plug-in helps out a lot of people and I have been able to give back to the EE community. From a purely financial standpoint, the plugin has been anything but worth it. I probably spend more time answering easy questions or fixing "problems" that could be overcome by looking at the documentation, than I actually make each month in sales."

"I highly encourage your development of a workflow addon. It's something that just hasn't been done in EE2 yet, and it's needed so badly. I am certain your investment will be worth it, even if it's more of a long-term goal to recoup the costs.

As I'm working on addons, I always try to focus on the "scratch your own itch" mindset. I build something that I want to use, which intensifies that value of the product beyond the revenue you generate. Most of the addon developers started out developing because they needed the tools, not because they wanted something to sell. I think that's really key. If a workflow module isn't something you need for your own clients, then you might not be the right person/team to develop it."

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