- Posted on
Tue Oct 30, 2018 10:39 am
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dduff617
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- Posts: 661
- Joined: Jul 05, 2006
- Location: Massachusetts, USA
joe, your comments seem reasonable and you certainly have more experience with plugin development than i do.
however, i suggest "making a living" does not necessarily need to be considered a minimum threshold for revenue from plugin development. to me a world with paid plugins does not mean that all or even most plugins have to be paid; many would continue free. some would be developed and "supported" by distributed teams of cooperating people, where taking revenue would create more problems than it would solve. some plugins might start off free, and aspire to eventually become high-enough quality and with a sufficient number of users to justify switching to paid status in the future. on the other hand, some developers may have no interest in getting into paid dev/support models whatsoever. i think similar models apply for software generally.
i think it is good for the Indigo ecosystem to encourage a developer who wants to go the extra mile to share their work and keep pushing from experiment to proof-of-concept to working software (where some revenue might start to kick in) to something that's really robust, user-friendly, and easy to install and configure (where a plugin might get "buy-in" from 10's to 100's of users and recurring payments from some).
in some cases, payments from a small number of users may represent little more than a token of appreciation or a way to add a degree of connection between developer and their users. in other cases, it may help offset the costs of a developer who might buy some extra gear they can use for testing and development or to refresh their own mac hardware and indigo license. realistically, i suspect only in a small number of cases are we going to be talking about "substantial" income.
i personally would be happy to be a part of an ecosystem that is generating more stuff that's fun and cool but also refined and reliable.
i also like the idea of rewarding a developer who goes the extra mile to perform "upkeep" on work they've completed to keep a plugin working as the platform around it gradually evolves, so i think a recurring payment model (such as annual subscription?) makes more sense than a one-time payment model, and it seems like IndigoDomotics arrived at a similar conclusion at some point over the last couple of years.
if i look at the amount of money i've spent on devices in my home -- thermostats, sprinkler controllers, locks, smoke detectors, motorized shades, receiver, sonos, etc. -- and then i look at the satisfaction i typically get from them, i find that it is often the case that the indigo plugin and the quality thereof plays a big part in determining how much real value i get from an investment in "smart home" stuff. in fact, i find i've almost become "jaded" about new gizmo's and gadgets - to the point where i'm really not up for yet-another-device that has a custom interface or will have yet-another-standalone-app to control it. maybe it does something cool, but if i can't integrate it with my indigo universe, the value is generally pretty low. to be really useful and integrated, it generally has to use a standard protocol (such as z-wave) OR it needs a plugin, or sometimes both. i find there are many cases where i'm thinking that if i could wave a wand and give myself the option to spend more to get more/better plugins, i would do it without hesitation.