DISCLAIMER: I have zero affiliation with moonbase
So i’m an independent developer and i’ve been working on various audio projects over the last few years and have gotten to the point where i can build full audio products thanks to JUCE.
I have been looking into how I would distribute the product and came across https://moonbase.sh/ and it blew my mind. They can manage all the licenses, process payments, have a storefront plugin for web apps, and they have a JUCE module!
I had the licensing setup in my application in one day. Honestly i just copy and pasted the docs into a LLM and let it do its thing. It took about 10 minutes to setup in my application.
The next day i spent setting up my landing page and integrating their storefront. Within 2 days I had everything I need to distribute software.
All of this infrastructure would have taken me months to setup. This is seriously game changing for indie developers. If you’re looking for a way to get your software out there, I would recommend a combination of Pamplejuce to build your binaries and Moonbase for your distribution.
And for those wanting to see what I made:
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Thank you for the kind words @botoxparty ! 
Yeah, we’ve been hard at work trying to make selling and buying plugins way easier, both for devs and customers. And thanks to @benediktadams building us a kick-ass JUCE module, and @sudara for documentation and useful articles, we’re in a really good place to help plugin devs go live. 
Since going live last year, we’ve now helped devs sell over 25.000 units, for a total revenue of a tad below €1M! 
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No support for UK sterling yet?
Not yet, but it’s something we’re considering! Do you have a lot of sales in the UK or otherwise in local currencies? Curious to understand why you ask as we haven’t had very many requests for it so far.
USD, EUR and GBP are the major western currencies so it’d seem odd to leave out GBP. Of course, I may be slightly biased since I’m in the UK. However, I’d expect to see CAD and AUD as well. That’s what I’d be going for if it was starting from scratch using Stripe or something similar. I’d at least want the major western currencies catered for.
So we avoid dealing with local currencies intentionally, as that’s part of the feedback we got when building Moonbase in the first place; both sellers and buyers prefers lower fees over localized currencies (in most cases, some exceptions).
Some of our competitors like FastSpring actually add a substantial conversion fee to local currencies (3.5%-5.5%) which is levied on the buyer, and quite hidden for most. This is obviously a competitive disadvantage, and we want to reduce these hidden conversion fees as much as possible.
That’s why we don’t perform any conversion, and send sellers all the currencies we collect, letting the recipient bank handle any conversion. This way our sellers and buyers can benefit from their banks that have far better fees and conversion rates than most platforms may be able to offer.
We’re gathering feedback on this though, and may start offering this as an optional feature for markets with particularly sensitive buyers like Japan and south american markets.
Appreciate you chiming in with your feedback too!
To clarify, so it’d be down to me to show the currency of purchase on the web site based on where the customer is from?
Then, if they buy in dollars, I’ll get dollars. If they’re from the UK and buy in Sterling I’ll get that in Sterling… and so on?
Then it’s up to me to convert. Is that how it works?
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Yeah, except that we only support USD and EUR at this moment, as the two major currencies our customers currently deal with.
It’s the two currencies customers relate to the most as well, and very few have issues paying USD for products bought online.
What we’ve seen is that sellers switching to Moonbase doesn’t experience any drop in sales from dropping support for local currencies, but rather see a small uptick in sales (although that’s probably because of our other sales-oriented features like segmented discounts etc).
Ok, so if my company is in the UK - which it is - then I have to either pick a dollar or euro price for my plugin?
That being the case, how is the VAT handled? Surely the VAT needs to be paid based on the origin of the company? Does this mean you don’t support UK companies yet?
Apologies to keeping pressing you on this - it’s because I’m genuinely interested.
Correct, you’d have to pick whether you’d want to sell your plugins in USD or EUR, or a combination of the two based on territory of the customer. We usually see our European merchants sell in both currencies, while the US merchants are often doing USD only.
VAT is an interesting topic when selling software; it is governed by the location of the buyer. This is why it’s such a massive headache for developers to sell across the world while staying compliant, and why companies like Moonbase exist; to handle VAT regulations at bigger scale. In this example, if you have UK customers, we would collect UK VAT and pay that for all sales in the UK. Just like we do with every other country in the world.
We support companies in any country (except for embargoed/sanctioned countries), and ultimately, you just receive a reverse invoice from Moonbase with the total payout of all sales you’ve had, simplifying your accounting a lot. Tax on this invoice happens on a reverse charge basis, since it’s a B2B transaction, with Moonbase again handling the VAT reporting on our end.
Hope this answers your questions, but feel free to send me a message if you have more! Happy to jump on a call if you want a demo as well. 
