Revenue Generation Ideas for Core Team #3683
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Private Plugin & Theme support in Marketplace:Add support for managing private plugins and themes through the marketplace for a fee. The fee would be recurring and could be per repo (theme / plugin) or tiered levels or a one-size-fits all approach. |
OctoberCMS Managed Hosting:Managed hosting provided by the OctoberCMS experts; who better to manage your hosting experience than the professionals that build October in the first place? |
Subscription/Recurring licenses for Marketplace Products:
Recurring license options for Marketplace Authors to provide ongoing support and improvements for their products. Think one time initial cost, plus discounted recurring fee for new updates and ongoing support. |
Professional Support Contracts:Pay for your company to have a support contract with the developers that build October for priority support and guidance. |
Feature bounty:Community members that really wants a certain feature, pay together until we get to a certain money threshold. That way, you could prioritise the most wanted and best revenue feature for octobercms for you guys. One feature I would more than willing to pay for is having more flexibility with many-to-many relations with pivot information in backend form. (note from Luke): See BountySource above |
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OctoberCMS SwagOffer OctoberCMS swag (tshirts, mugs, stickers, etc.) for sale online |
Agency Recruitment CampaignI don't want to be negative but it seems to me that there simply aren't enough October users that want to spend money so the partner programme and market place gratuity seem like the only viable options for squeezing money out of a project like this. Rather than looking for additional revenue streams I'd be spending more time on growing these. There are a lot of agencies about who have clients with huge budgets and who would not hesitate to pay for a ready to go plugin to save on development time. I'd suggest that those of us who are here focus on creating premium plugins that replicate functionally found in other products. The core team need to organise a non spammy way to start a conversation with some of these bigger agencies and find out what they need to be done to help them transition away from what they are doing now and on to October. Naturally, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes but you have an excellent product that just needs selling a bit more. |
Improved Partner ProgramIn my own circumstance, the only way I can see ourselves as an agency making a meaningful contribution is via a regular monthly payment of something like $50 - $100. I know this currently possible, but it's tricky convincing other members of management to commit to that sort of spend without anything in return. We've looked closely at becoming a partner, but the lump sum spend has been the roadblock. My suggestion is therefore an improvement to the partner program, with the option to pay monthly. Extra benefits like extended functionality (included premium plugins maybe) or possibly even something like credits towards @lunfel's bounty idea I believe would also go a long way towards helping convince others in a similar position to us to get their hands in their pockets. |
Marketplace PackagesAdding a new section in Marketplace to offer packages of plugins/themes, something like public Projects. |
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I work in an agency, and we would be really happy to pay a recurring fee in order to be able to setup some private plugins and themes on october websites (synced with the project feature). As an agency, I would prefer to pay a forfait for an unlimited number of private plugins and themes. If pond is a good tool, we would also pay in order to use it. But it seems to become a chimera. We would also pay for an extended licence for a good visual page builder (like the one you teased before abandon it). |
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@Alex360hd @ErrantQuill @onurguven what's the reason for the thumbs down on managed hosting and recurring licenses? |
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For me, as an agency, we already have our own servers so I completely don't care about managed hosting. I would prefer you put some efforts in things that directly concern our everyday job (I think about media manager revamp, private plugins and theme, etc...) that would change our everyday life. For reccuring licence it was a mistake (even if it's low in the list of things I would like to see for october, it could be a nice addition). |
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@Alex360hd is the media manager revamp something that your company would be interested in sponsoring? |
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It's hard actually cause sponsoring, opensource etc... are not in the DNA of my boss actually (try to change that). That's why I push for ideas that would convince my boss to give you some money cause you deserve it and it would bring to us an immediate and real gain. (media manager would too but it's not like subscribing to a service). |
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@Alex360hd try pitching the media manager improvements as hiring an external consultant / freelancer to build a tool that would be available for all of your OctoberCMS projects ;) |
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@LukeTowers Because often, updates to a plugin can include security updates or compatibility fixes with various composer package updates. It seems unfair to charge someone again just to keep their site functional and secure. A system to only charge for feature updates or something of the sort would then mean having to maintain LTS versions and whatnot. Seems like a hassle for everyone involved. |
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@ErrantQuill the current marketplace model is everything is provided in "as-is" condition. The idea behind the recurring licenses would be something like GravityForms model where you pay a yearly fee to continue getting updates and support. If anything it makes it better for the user because then the author actually has a reason to keep their plugin up to date and working well. |
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@LukeTowers That's a fair point, actually. I've a bit of a jaded opinion since clients in my country fight tooth and nail over pennies. Having said that, a subscription model isn't exactly ideal for projects that require multiple plugins. I just went over the catalogue and found quite a few plugins offering pretty basic functionality and charging like $40 for it. I suggest at least setting stringent criteria for SaaS type plugins. For instance, the Shopaholic suite is just really pricey to get just the basic features any competent eCommerce site ought to have, whereas JKShop seems to offer it all for just $50. I'd be okay with JKShop being a SaaS plugin, not Shopaholic. No offense, but I honestly think the marketplace needs more stringent standards than what seem to be implemented, currently. EDIT: Holy damn there are some serious messes on the marketplace. The WebSockets one is probably the messiest implementation of WebSockets I have come across. Again, I really don't want to be a douche but I don't know what else to say about it. Good thing it's free eh :D EDIT 2: What I'm really afraid of, I guess, is October going down the same rabbit hole of overpriced, underdeveloped plugins that PrestaShop did. Currently, some of the best plugins on your marketplace are free. The SEO Manager one looks like it's good, and certainly offers some very useful features for $5. And then there's the Giveaway plugin that costs $40. There needs to at least be some standardisation of pricing. I realise that it's a difficult task, but there needs to be stringent quality control for any SaaS marketplace. |
Job / Freelance MarketplacePersonally I would like it if you had a market place where I could pay other developers to do some work, as we are swamped by all the work we got! (due to us trying to go the extra mile for all our clients). But yah a Marketplace where we can rate and review and pay for jobs etc. I'm all up for! @LukeTowers @daftspunk I'm all for you guys making money from this project. I just want to add a comment saying please dont make October CMS end up like Pyro CMS. I was with them for many years and the owner was very rude and made all the plugins over priced when he upgraded the CMS to V3. So I decided to move across to October CMS and I really love the CMS and the People and Team behind it. Also I would not even have a problem if you added Google adverts to October website etc. (Just dont add Crypto miming software pls). Lastly, a big Thank you to all the help you given me over the years! May October become bigger than rubbish Wordpress in the near future! |
October CMS ConferenceStart a conference. Sell tickets and sponsorships. |
October CMS Paid Tutorials/Lessons from Nooby to OctoNinjaCreate a tutorials/lessons for beginners and advanced Users. Really would love to have 'tips & tricks' from the core team, to know all the goodies. |
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//w20k: Very good idea, I think... Lots of 'us' (noobies) would appreciate a such feature... Imagine: Juste a videos serie, as Ivan Doric done, but in a backend, each user could auto-evaluate his own comprehension of each lesson Every time he connects, he can see exactly with the list of the lessons and the output of a note he gave (or not yet) :
Hoping you have understood what I mean, my english is so bad... |
I agree on the visual page builder part. Maybe put it on Bountysource and even sell it under Rainlab in the marketplace? For example: This Wordpress page builder plugin https://codecanyon.net/item/visual-composer-page-builder-for-wordpress/242431 has over 300.000 sales * 46 dollars ... |
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@SaifurRahmanMohsin you absolutely don't understand what I mean and translated it from your position completely wrong. The authors will continue to receive their revenue as it was. Example: If any random user buys a plugin, he will pay $ 15, which will be divided between the author and the marketplace. But the standard affiliate price is low for such maneuvers, so we need to raise it a bit to cover the discount. The partners that pay more than others, probably want to get more benefits from the affiliate program. So by the cost of the highest partner program, October can cover the cost of cheap plugins. So if you publish your plugin for $1, you will still receive money for it, but not from the buyer but from the marketplace itself. The problem is that the affiliate program is useless right now. In fact, it is not even an affiliate. Not all partners are going to release plugins or templates in the marketplace, so they do not need the author badge. And not all clients of these partners will search for them on the OctoberCMS website. Therefore, it looks more like a donation (which is not bad). But if we are talking about an affiliate program, then both sides should receive benefits from it. |
Move the donation section to the main pagehttps://octobercms.com/fundraising The section with donations should not be hidden in the bowels of the site as it is now. It is necessary to bring it to the main page, so that everyone can see it. I am sure that the majority did not even know about its existence. |
Now we're talking about just shifting around when / how the partner pays for that plugin whether that is in a bulk purchase as a part of their renewal or as the cost of the plugin when they buy it. If we started offering to pay for plugins for partners that's an arrangement that only makes sense for partners to engage in when it has the potential to actively hurt our financial situation if we have to pay for more plugins then they paid for with their partner contributions. |
You absolutely right, and that's why we are discussing it here. There are many options to protect October from such a problem. For example, a fixed number of plugins per month at a certain price or in the price range. and etc. |
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@FlusherDock1 Ok, I think I get what you mean. I am still skeptical if the difference would cover the cost. I have a strong feeling that if this is implemented, many users will download the plugins that were in the $1-5 slab but would then be free and the partners who are shelling out more for the program will only get only a small bump in the sales of their plugins. I highly doubt that the difference would make up even a fraction to compensate for the plugins that are now free but OctoberCMS is paying their partners for. And the increase in price would also mean fewer partners. I believe this is the likely outcome from what I've read--unless I'm still interpreting this wrong. |
I can help with graphic design for the T-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc.. I'll throw around some ideas in Slack soon. Let me know if you guys are still considering this option to help fund OctoberCMS. |
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@inawrath @jonpxpx @keevitaja @Eoler @BenjaVR @robballantyne @xseguib @VoroninWD @Hocopor @axomat @vanmil @seanthepottingshed @chrisbethelepb @rluders @luizbills @tobias-kuendig @Thejuse @datune @jan-vince @mightyhaggis @jluisgarcia @Zotenme @pfEugene @webmaxx @mmjjb @Cryden @drmzio @MrGKanev Private Plugins & Themes are now offered in the marketplace: https://octobercms.com/blog/post/welcome-private-plugins-themes. It's free for all partners (for as long as they remain a partner) and $7/month or $77/year otherwise. |
IMPROVING MARKETING STRATEGYMore User == More Money I'm a newcomer, currently using October CMS for few months. I'm coming from Joomla! and switched to Laravel. I was looking for Laravel Admin Panel (or CMF) to build custom CRM/ERP solutions for small businesses and found and tried Backpack for Laravel, Laravel Voyager, Lavalite and so on... but I didn't find October because it advertise itself as a CMS. I think October is much more than just a CMS, its admin panel can be used as a standalone backend application and as a CMF framework for custom CRUD projects. Compered to above solutions (Backpack, Voyager, Lavalite...) october is more powerful. I think there are thousands of developers who is in the same situation as I was (searching the right solution) but didn't find October. Laravel Voyager has almost the same amount of stars on github as October (fitst github release on May 24, 2017 ) but it's functionality and code base is a joke compared to October. So I think it would be important to modify the marketing strategy and communicate on octobercms .com that October is more than just a CMS |
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@danielbidala @LukeTowers made few changes to the OCMS description, pretty much, it's a CMF now:
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@w20k Yes, it's a good starting point but the github page doesn't have too much marketing value if any. On octobercms.com home page it's a CMS yet. The home page and features page must contain the most important and outstanding functions of October:
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All, I've been accepted to the GitHub sponsors program so I've setup my page there: https://github.com/users/LukeTowers/sponsorship. This could be a great way of offering priority support on the issue trackers, so please check it out! Also note that GitHub will match up to $5,000 of your contributions to me for the first year of the program, so get in early to have your contribution worth double! |
@LukeTowers just started sponsoring you. Hope I will be able to increase the amount in the near future👍 |
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My idea is a subscription payment structure for the best features of the Marketplace. One idea for a new feature I was thinking about is to add webhooks to the Marketplace. For example when someone pays for a plugin, theme, etc you can have the option of having the marketplace server send an API request to the url of your choosing. This would allow developers to create their own audit log of purchases and perhaps other things in the future. Perhaps there could be a full on Marketplace API that developers could use to query information into their own databases. I was thinking that useful features like this in the Marketplace could be available in some sort of subscription model. General use and publishing of plugins and themes in the marketplace would of course be free, but the best features like webhooks, Marketplace API, the already existing feature of private repositories, etc would be for subscription-based developers only. This would require further development of the Marketplace, but I don't think it would be too hard to make the value developers are receiving worth the subscription cost. I'm not sure how many plugin developers there are, but just looking at the leader board and 355 deverlopers listed there, if you took a modest fee of $8/mo and 300 out of 355 signed up for the subscription, it would bring in an extra $2400/mo. I totally think the core team deserves some revenue for themselves for all of their hard work. |
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I was thinking on my last post more, and I really like the idea of the Marketplace having an API. It would allow full automation when deploying a new project/website even with paid plugins and themes. If a client has the correct API key, the client app/script can make purchases which automatically adds plugins and themes to a project and could potentially allow everything to be deployed automatically via CLI/console. This would make OctoberCMS more appealing for larger companies to possibly want to adopt it as a framework. |
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@mrgswift feel free to open another issue with more specifics on what sort of functionality / endpoints you'd be thinking for an API. No promises that it'll happen, but the more information provided the better :) |
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More and more people start to realise that the things that set different software products apart have more to do with the services around the software (most notably support) than with having some fashionable innovations first that will be copied by some competing software in no time. You can easily standardise software and make it cheaper or even virtually free, but the time you spend giving support is time that is dedicated to a specific person with a specific problem. It therefor makes business sence to me that this dedicated time should not be free but paid. Some sort of SLA or some sort of integrated system offering paid support tickets so developers can easily escalate a support issue to October. I suspect that a lot of companies and freelancers would gladly pay a reasonable fee for some kind of commercial support for those times when you do not want to wait for any free support from the community and want to escalate the support ticket to October (in some cases a support ticket could even be billed to one of your clients for a slightly higher fee). In it's most basic form this could be a dedicated forum channel where only the October team can answer questions with priority (guaranteed response time). Who would not pay $10/month, $20/month, ?? for that insurance? You could also add a support ticket system to the support page. Pay $15 - $20 for up to 15 minutes support from the core team when submitting the ticket. I don’t like sponsoring specific people (Patreon/Git). I care about the services around products and those should not depend too much on any specific persons. |
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Brainstorming and expanding futhur on my previous post: I never liked the partner concept for October as it is not mutual (as any partnership should be). It would make much more sense to me if the partner program could be expanded to be more than just a paid-for credential.
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Maybe you could sign up here? |
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@tobias-kuendig huh, neat. We don't have a corporate entity AFAIK, but I'll mention it to @daftspunk |
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It would make sense to list OctoberCMS in the Open Collective. I hear that several organizations such as Google fund good web frameworks esp. open source ones so might give it a shot. Plus the extra publicity always helps SEO-wise. |
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@SaifurRahmanMohsin it already is, see the first comment:
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Credit @Samuell1 adding his suggestion,
I would be happy to pay october $20 a month for this service etc. |
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I'd like to thank everyone for their great comments in this thread! We've started offering paid support contracts: https://octobercms.com/blog/post/premium-support-plans-are-here so we'll be closing this issue and focusing our efforts on that for now. Thanks again, and check out the paid support program! |
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Has anyone taken a look at the Google Patch Rewards program? if you could show them how a grant from Google would help you increase October's security there's a shot in the dark that they might accept it. |
and others
This is to discuss revenue generation ideas for the core development team (@LukeTowers, @daftspunk , @alekseybobkov) in order to keep the project going strong.
Each idea should be a separate comment and should be voted / shown support for with emoji reactions. Ideas and discussion appreciated. NOTE: Please only show support for ideas that you would pay money for / signup for.
Current Revenue Streams:
Marketplace Gratuity: 30% of Marketplace sales goes to maintaining the marketplace
Partner Program: Paid promotional slots for businesses that deal with OctoberCMS
Private Plugins & Themes: Private plugins & themes hosted on the marketplace
Luke's Patreon: Patreon account to support the me directly
Luke's GitHub Sponsors GitHub sponsors program to support me directly
One time & Recurring donations: One time & recurring donations made on the OctoberCMS website
Feature Sponsoring & Bountysource: One-off improvements to the platform and plugins that are funded by the community. See https://www.bountysource.com/teams/rainlab.
OpenCollective: See https://opencollective.com/octobercms
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