Our initial idea was to make a real App Store/marketplace where app authors can publish apps themselves and optionally monetize. A marketplace has the usual catch-22 issue where we need to have enough users and publishers. So as a first step we have taken the app publish/update responsibility ourselves to get users on the platform. Once we have enough users, we will be in a position to work more closely with app authors.

Currently we are not in a position to do this, it would be great of course. At the moment we do contribute to the upstream projects.

Please note, what we have is not a true app store with pay-per-app, but the subscription is to ensure we have the resources to package, test and support the apps on Cloudron. We have elaborate unit tests for each app as well as do manual testing, since we want to deliver a saas style update experience.

seems like you could add a "feature request" tier that pays money back and aggregates feature requests.