It takes skill and experience to build plug-ins. Because of this, developers who are good at making plug-ins are expensive. A skilled developer is worth $100 per hour or more.
It also takes a lot of work to build plug-ins. A plug-in can easily take hundreds or thousands of hours to make. (The maximum a typical developer works is 2000 hours per year.)
Multiply these numbers together and $20k is a very small amount. You usually need more than one person as well.
EDIT: Don’t get me wrong, having access to potential customers can be a great boon for an indie plug-in developer. But you’re not selling it very well.
You’re correct that offering a free plugin in exchange for an email list subscription is a great way to build a mailing list, but two things I can speak of having done this:
a) people will subscribe to the list, grab the free plugin, and immediately unsubscribe
b) only about 2-3% of the remaining subscribers will convert to paying customers (at best)
I always love rereading this KVR thread… Once you get to “analogue is better bc software exists in a different dimension than humans and hardware” that’s when the good part starts
But I think there is difference between email group of people to where you send paid plugins offers, and group where you send paid plugin deals because deals can drop almost to zero (sometimes 90% sale) and those are pretty much almost like “free plugins” at least close to it, you know what I mean
When you just inform about new cool plugin that costs from 50 to 100$ (or more) it’s understandable people won’t get much interested, but yet could read about it
While when you inform about 90% UAD sale, (as BPB did recently) which is free plugin blog actually, it’s more friendly to me, I just try to think if that 30K free subs could work with sales pitches…
I would either provide my ideas for plugins that I have some idea how they could be once they are done OR find a guy that could help to do it (I would take care of that). I would be very specific in design (colors, style, fine-tuning of visuals, in this I’m very confident), and also provide feedback by myself for the audio side of things + other producers/people from my site that has good audio knowledge and feel
regarding marketing, I would then use my site as a main leverage (80% traffic just plugins alone), monthly 100K+ readers, then for sure youtube, and also using the email list to promote it (as I said before, I never did this as I get used to organic traffic)
For promo on the site, we would either promote it in our lists, (I propose promoting free plugins in the “best plugins” lists, so it doesn’t look weird) so these would build site’s authority and name overtime
Then, for paid plugins we would have just main sales page, that could include audio comparisons (A/B before after), for example for plugins like saturation, reverb, and so on. then there could be testimonials from artists (I could give paid plugin for free to established artists and ask for their opinion on it and include it on the product page).
Then, to get featured with paid plugins on other sites, we can run sales. Let’s say plugin goes for 100$ - then we make 90% sale (so 10$ per unit), this way, we could get promoted on many sites and get attention for paid plugins as well. Yes it would be much cheaper, but I believe this niche is more about quantity and wise pricing (many people / low prices) than few people and big pricing. Or I can add 50% OFF for a plugin and keep it there perpetually so it just adds the urgency (see the Waves plugins they have sales for every single plugin xD and keep it like that)
Your flexible renegotiation throughout this thread leaves me with a strong suspicion that you expected creating a line of plugins to be easy, quick money that wouldn’t require any up-front investment. I would be surprised if you spent more than 20 minutes really thinking about the terms you suggested in your initial post. Now that you’ve experienced some push-back from the programming community, it looks to me like you’re desperately trying to convince someone, anyone, who can slap together a plugin to just churn out something you can shove on your site to get more email list signups.
As others have pointed out, having a large mailing list does not guarantee that your plugins will make any money. Having a lot of site traffic does not guarantee that your plugins will make any money. The only way to prove financial viability is with a record of proven sales – I see 3 plugins already on your website, what are the total and average monthly sales figures for each of them? The only way I would even remotely consider a development deal without being paid up front is if you show me sales figures, and they meet my standards for desired income from royalties. (I can pretty much deduce this won’t be the case, since you seemed surprised that a plugin could even make $20k…)
I’m sorry if I seem aggressive, but frankly, I’m frustrated with how little you value programmers’ time – not only in your proposed business deal, but also in the circular discussions we’ve had in this thread! And you’ve repeatedly tried to convince multiple professionals in this field that we shouldn’t expect to be paid for our time because “it can’t be that hard”…
I should stop writing this post now before I feel the need to send you an invoice.
@slx19 you should also consider that this is a public forum. If I Google search for “Integraudio”, this thread is on the first page of results. Do with that information what you will.
I don’t want to be too hard on this person because I like the entrepreneurial thinking. And having access to an audience with people who are interested in buying plug-ins is valuable. It’s just that the numbers don’t add up.
I can imagine this proposal might make sense for a newbie developer who just wants to get some experience doing quick plug-ins, with not much to lose if it doesn’t pan out. But it doesn’t make sense for developers who know their value.
This is true, but it’s a two-sided coin: a young developer partnering with a shady/disreputable distributor can just as easily damage their professional reputation through that association.
I agree with most of the sentiments from the experienced developers here so I won’t reiterate that.
What I will add is hopefully some advise to those less experienced developers about entering in to partnerships with people having done this early on in my career and regretted it…
Going in to a revenue share agreement with essentially an unknown business entity is risky business. Not only due to the inherent risk of a royalties deal, but you don’t know the other person. Business relationships are hard, it’s very easy to get in to a situation where each party feels like they are contributing more and doesn’t value the other, especially when sales aren’t as good as originally envisaged (heads up, they never are).
I’ve seen situations where other parties either delay payments, or don’t pay at all. It’s often also the case that you won’t even have visibility to the sales data so can’t even know how much you should be getting. Then what happens when you as a developer want to move on and earn some real money? What have you inadvertently agreed to in this “partnership”? This level of stress can be overwhelming and scary for inexperienced people and I don’t wish that on anyone.
Additionally, if you are inexperienced, it can be very difficult when all the responsibility to create releasable software is on you. It is a lot harder than most people (even developers) think. I can’t stress this enough. Even “simple” ideas are more complicated than you think. If it was easy, we’d be living in an industry full of millionaires when the reality is that audio is underpaid compared to other software development industries. There’s just not as much money in it as people think, often due to this “race to the bottom” the OP is proposing.
I can see the allure as a young developer wanting to “own” their output but make sure you weigh up what that will involve. IMO joining an organisation that will pay your bills and offer some kind of mentorship is by far the more valuable approach. If they’re a small or flexible company, they may even want to offer you equity to keep you. Just make sure it’s the right thing for you at your stage in your career.
OP hasn’t even considered fixed costs. Your $10 price doesn’t work. Credit card processing through a third party easily eats up around $5 for that sale, because these 3rd parties have minimums per transaction.
$100 sale = $90 reaches you
$10 sale = $5 reaches you
You need to sell 18 times the number of units to make the SAME.
Race to the bottom indeed. You devalue the developers work, and damage their reputation in one fell swoop.
Ideas are cheap, solutions are VERY hard and expensive. You don’t provide solutions, business plans, designs, etc. just a list of people who want free stuff.
If you want to ship AAX, add the cost of at least 1 iLok. And this is still leaving out things like CI, which can be quite expensive for private repos.
