Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension

Re:Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension by mherrmann on Friday November 11, 2016 @08:36AM (#12930441)

I know of a very popular Mac desktop app whose sales dropped by 90% overnight when the author made it open source (but still asked users to pay). The reason I know this is that I was thinking of open sourcing my file manager [1]. I did some research, found the aforementioned Mac app and got in touch with the author who told me how open sourcing had affected sales. It would have made my project unsustainable, so I decided against open source. I ended up choosing a different business strategy [2].

1: https://fman.io 2: https://fman.io/blog/fmans-business-strategy/

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Re:Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension by speps on Friday November 11, 2016 @09:08AM (#12930702)

Your app looks so much like Sublime Text that it could just follow the same model: paid closed source app + free open source plugins on a repository maintained by you (like Package Control). As far as I know, Sublime Text is doing pretty well.

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Re:Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension by Raphmedia on Friday November 11, 2016 @09:30AM (#12930882)

I use Sublime from time to time and never had to pay for the packages. As far as I am aware of it Sublime has the same business model as WinRAR. Totally free with an annoying popup asking for you to get a license.

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Re:Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension by mherrmann on Friday November 11, 2016 @10:39AM (#12931563)

Yes, that's pretty much the plan.

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