Pligg Addons Coming Soon

[Yankidank]

I'm developing a sister site for Pligg that will sell premium modules and templates for Pligg. Before opening it up I would like to get some opinions on what pricing most people would be comfortable with paying for some of these items. Below is what I'm estimating the prices to be, I'd like to hear your reactions and suggestions.

Premium Pligg Module: $2-5 dollars
These modules would offer some features a little nicer than the standard ones that come with Pligg. Most will cost about $3. The super-complicated modules will go for higher prices, but for the most part they will be pretty cheap.

Pligg Template: $5-10 Dollars
Pligg developers deserve some money for their time spent providing users with templates.

Pligg Support (60 minutes): $30 Dollars
This is only for simple support for specific questions. This is not meant to hire us for long term projects at this price. You will purchase "Support Tokens" for the general area that you need help in. The areas you can select from will be: Graphics/Layout, Advanced Pligg Hacking, Installation and Upgrading, and General Pligg Help. Prices may vary by category and each category will be assigned to a specialist in the specific area.

Have a template or module that you wish to sell?
Contact me via the forum private messages and we can discuss prices. All contributors will be issued payment at the beginning of each month via Paypal. A portion of the money earned by the site will go toward Pligg.

[wwwSENSERELYcom]

oh bad news for users who want only free software.. good for developers..

[revolver]

I don't know if i like the idea of a marketplace for add ons. I hope there's a better way to reward mod developers for their hard work. I'm just worried that selling add ons will slowly distort the open source spirit of the project, since so much of pligg's future feature set will reside in mods. But I don't build add ons and I'm not a Pligg developer so it would be good to hear other opinions. Has this sort of model worked well for other open source projects? Is a donation based marketplace for mods more appropriate?

A few other questions spring to mind ...

If the marketplace takes off, will many important features only be available as paid for add ons? If you need to buy 10 $5 add ons to get the functionality you are looking for then pligg essentially costs $50. That's still very cheap for what you get, but it isn't free. Will pligg start to feel like a slightly crippled demo product without the premium functionality of the paid add ons? Will all developers continue to update their add ons for security and compatibility? If not, can someone else step in and take over the code? (How will paid for add ons be licensed?) Will major upgrades to mods cost more money?

[abcdefgary]

it really all depends on what we're paying for in order for these prices to be reasonable or not.

what I'd really like to see is a service that offers people who can create hacks for Pligg, making your site unique in some way. I would pay a lot for someone like that (since I have a few requests/suggestions of my own to make my pligg site unique).

[Simon]

This issue was raised before with suggestions of a template database. Initially I was for such a setup, to get more templates released, but then the pont was made that pligg isn't really stable enough to allow for one. Some developers will probably not keep up with updates to the base code, especially while pligg isn't the finished article.

I don't know how donations and ad revenue (adsense, paid links) do on this site, although it seems to get a fair amount of traffic. From past experience, I do know that most users of mods are not too willing to donate.

I do think that since only premium mods would be considered for commercial release, that maybe developers should be required to release a "lite" version for free. Many developers use this approach when creating plugins for vbulletin or wordpress. This way, everyone can benefit, but the people who would like advanced functionality pay a little bit for it. Developers are compensated for extra work, but nothing becomes overly commercialised.

That's just my view - "lite" version required, premium versions can be sold for a slight cost through pligg, meaning the process is regulated / moderated. If you want a lot of extra functionality, paying a little for it seems reasonable enough. And allow custom requests too, so that developers could bid for pligg-related projects!

[dollars5]

I am totally against this every one is going to start building on to something, post a demo or link and say it costs $XXX - totally degrading the performance of all contributors. I think templates can be the way they are atp - people can list their services at ads section and if someone interested will sure contact and take their help.

I am damn sure this will just bring down the active contributors - every one will start saying please visit this link to purchase the mod/template. And somedays it is gonna lead to dog fights with cheap mod/template developers peeping in and people are all gonna be totally confused.

Wordpress, Drupal lives better without such commercial add-ons - there are commercial developers who will list their services and sponsor the projects - I think that is the way to go. And we already have it as the services section advertisements.

[kbeeveer46]

The only thing bad that I think may happen is that someone may make a mod and charge $5 for it and then someone else might come along and basically copy all of the code and change the mod slightly to do something else. Basically the second mod will only have a few lines of code that are different from the original but charge $10 and never give any money back to the original author.

personally, I probably won't have time to do any coding/moding but this is something that everyone who does will have to consider

[tiger2f]

Nice Idea but if the developers stop creating free open source stuff for Pligg then this will hurt it's growing popularity.

[Simon]

*cough* hosted services better option for commercialisation *cough*

[Yankidank]

A hosted option would require us to take on full-time employees to manage and maintain. We don't have to manpower or resources available to take on such a venture, but I have been in talks with a company who will hopefully provide this service soon. These modules are really inexpensive and won't replace the free modules that already come bundled with Pligg. We intend on still offering free modules and templates, these extras are intended to help give something back to the developers directly rather than the Pligg project. Most of the Pligg donations taken in go toward Pligg hosting and other such fees, not the developers. I also think that by giving developers a place to sell their goods will help us find new developers and encourage current developers to continue advancing Pligg. Do not think that we are ruining the spirit of open source just by selling a few goods.

An example of a premium module would be GreyBox, as featured on scadnab.com. Try it out by clicking on one of the article links.