Hello. I’m one of the Gold Clip developers. Even though one of the main target markets for Gold Clip is mixing and mastering engineers, for whom the ‘Gold’ relates to a well know piece of studio equipment, it also has a reasonable trial period and a rent-to-own option.
You can use this trial period to see if it’s reliable and does it’s job.
I don’t know how much information you expect to learn from the name of the plugin, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to change the name to be full of the features that the plugin has.
Gold Clip is a good example of a plugin which is designed not to just ‘shift units’ but to become an invaluable part of the studio process. It’s fine if your target is not that market, I just don’t think its a relevant comparison.
Lacking experience/ having wrong ideas is one thing, but OP’s attitude throughout this entire thread is dismissive of the value (ie cost) of plugin development services. (Not to mention dismissive of the fact that developers are people who have bills to pay.)
This was a fun morning, but I’m now quite surprised this thread isn’t locked. (@anthony-nicholls@reuk@t0m ?)
well there is that gap between guys that have vision and pro guys that just want to get paid for the work, and none of the parties want to retreat, I think I’m not alone with this syndrome maybe I really have to become a millionaire first to start hiring someone to develop VSTs
It’s not about I don’t value your work at all… I just have this approach to it, I don’t like to pay someone in advance so much if it does not sell if it’s good enough, it will sell, what’s the problem here?
You just want to get paid paid paid, and then what, you rather get paid once and then move onto another guy, and another guy… I think my way is just better in a long run. Maybe I’m dreaming, but that’s how I feel about it
It’s no way someone won’t be interested in that venture, where musician that has good connections can’t just work with someone on something… if he is passionate enough he would do it I believe I find that guy once, and money will just come
I’m just doing same with my writers, 50/50 split. We grow 5 new sites now, one about iphones and it’s just growing, guy is excited and just do it. he knows that he works for free ,but then once it earns he get that 50% share
just photo how site grows, he put all the effort to make it work and it seems to work, same we would apply with plugins
I know it smells a lot for others, it would for me too if I’m developer as well I guess, but think about it, isn’t idea of long term earning better? when you are confident about it that it would work, then actual one time payment is just a sh!t compared to it
That’s called the risk of doing business. If you want to be an entrepreneur, that risk is on you.
Let’s say it takes me two months to develop a plug-in (it will usually be much longer). And let’s say my normal hourly rate is $100. Then 8 weeks of 40 hours is worth $32,000.
So essentially I’d be investing $32k into your business. Not in money but in work hours.
You want to share the profits 66%:33%, so that means if I’m putting in $32k, I expect you to put in $16k of value somehow. Otherwise, why should you get 33%?
By paying in advance you’re putting some skin in the game. Otherwise all the risk is on the developer, not on you.
I’ve been reluctant to close the thread personally. I think the replies have generally been well considered and useful! I can see the value in a number of comments shared here both to those who have similar ideas and those who are developers starting out.
However I will say that this topic is definitely on the line and we may have to lock it soon. @slx19 please do be careful this is a forum of talented and experienced developers, I would suggest you would be wise to take very seriously the feedback already given by them.
@slx19 for your sake and others interested I think it’s worth understanding the parts of development you may not have fully considered for example…
Licensing, there’s no mention of how this would be handled if there isn’t any this may seriously dent sales, if there is something that will take time and money
Any complex visual representations can be very time consuming (FFT, Graphs, Scopes, Waveforms, etc.), even more so if they are required to be interactive,
Testing - platforms, architectures, plugin formats, sample rates, buffer sizes, channel formats, realtime/offline rendering, screen resolutions, windows sizes, graphics cards, etc. - even if you really get the list right down to the bare minimum you’re still talking about a fair number of combinations that need to be tested. Testing also requires lots of equipment that needs to be purchased
CI (continuous integration) to build all the plugins for all the formats, architectures, and platforms. First there’s putting it together and managing the infrastructure but also managing the ongoing cost of it
Licences, for example JUCE or other third party licences for the DSP
Customer support, if you have a lot of customers this could get get quite busy
Accessibility of the plugins for example for visually impaired users, or for addressing other markets/languages
Installers
Dealing with the fallout from updates to OS’s, DAW’s, other dependencies (such as JUCE), etc.
Making the software maintainable, there’s a difference if you want to write these once and never do any updates, compared to maintaining them for the future in which other developers may need to read and update the code
Fixing bugs, they happen and from time to time they can be very time consuming!
That by no means is an extensive list but my point is that there’s always more than just the plugin itself. IME the DSP is normally the quicker part to implement, the GUI very often takes quite a considerable amount of time in comparison but if these are all maybe 1-4 very simple controls (basic sliders or rotaries) with ideally no or very little visual feedback and no interactive elements other than the simple controls, and the visuals are very basic solid colours and shapes, then maybe in that case the GUIs wouldn’t be too demanding.
That being said IMO one month to build even a very simple plugin is extremely ambitious I’ve encountered bugs that have taken up more of my time than that. Maybe once a few have been done the others might be easy enough if the DSP is extremely straight forward. Maybe you could get examples ready in advance using something like Max/MSP, and preparing some artwork / visuals yourself.
For example I once ported 6 cut down plugins from VSTGUI to JUCE, the DSP was done (although we found and fixed bugs on the way), the visuals were mostly images, and the full blown versions had already been ported to JUCE. There was also no licensing because these were being embedded in a single DAW, which also reduces the testing coverage required. I can’t remember exactly how long it took but I’m sure it was more than 6 months, probably more like 9-12 months. And I at least had the support of QA for testing and other developers in the office if I was stuck on anything.
I think every contractor I’ve ever hired has taken longer than expected, everyone including the developers themselves under estimates the amount of time and effort required, and there has always been more refinement required than expected too.
I think it would be a big ask for someone to take on that kind of risk esp. if they have families and they already have good paid work available (which is probably true of most people capable of delivering what you’re asking for).
I do think there’s a lot of value to be had in this discussion. It contains things that often don’t get considered so having a wide range of experience and opinions on the business side of audio development being openly shared is nice to see.
I guess the relevant missing piece of information here is the revenue streams. It’s all very well to create something with a fair number of views, but proving that’s worth real money is something else entirely.
I had an intensely negative reaction to OP because, for me, I see no significant value that the programmer gets out of the proposed deal, and simultaneously OP is asserting that developing VSTs shouldn’t cost that much. To me it came off as arrogant and dismissive of the very labor he seeks to exploit. Someone else proposing a similar deal but conducting themselves differently in forum communications may have elicited a different reaction from me.
That could be true, I’m just saying from my experience working on Blowdio was fast and easy also I can say, I paid guy discussed price, and it was done under month, there could be some tweaks done overtime to it though, now it just need installers for it… for that I choose Pulse downloader, which takes 1,8% off the sale (fair enough) after that plugin should be ready to go
But I’m comparing the total impressions (105k) to the total clicks (2.9k) to get the % of viewers who click: 2.9/105 = 2.76%. This means out of 100 visitors to your site, 2 or 3 of them clicked on anything.
If both the total clicks and the total impression curves keep growing at the same rate (which it looks like they generally have been, since at least 1/24), then that % clickers is going to stay about the same.
Now, I’m by no means an SEO professional, but to me this 2.76% clicking rate seems pretty low. I’m happy to be corrected if this is in fact a normal looking rate, but my gut tells me that you’ve got a site with a lot of views and little engagement.
So there are two days, first either find a guy willing to go with it my way, or just get super rich so that I get comfortable paying for it, and if I make a mistake it won’t matter, because I can afford to pay for another 20 plugins that’s just how it is, it’s actually good idea, once you have money, you can experiment forever, that’s the point I need to reach!
I just hate the idea of playing safe and all this, it’s always on the edge, either or…
Ok it’s time to get back to work and increase income!
Anyway if you are thinking about doing something with us, you could let me know, we have some great authority on promoting “best of” plugins which we covered almost all, it doesn’t mean we would include our plugins in those categories, it’s just that we have presence about VST plugins in general, I can say that we can sell plugins (for those that doubt), my PB affiliate is earning consistently
maybe I really have to become a millionaire first to start hiring someone to develop VSTs