October: Revenue Generation Ideas for Core Team

[LukeTowers]

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

[LukeTowers]

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.

[LukeTowers]

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?

[LukeTowers]

Subscription/Recurring licenses for Marketplace Products:

NOTE: Moved to https://github.com/octobercms/october/issues/4662

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.

[LukeTowers]

Professional Support Contracts:

Pay for your company to have a support contract with the developers that build October for priority support and guidance.

[lunfel]

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

[LukeTowers]

@lunfel we already accept feature bounties. Feel free to create an issue for your desired enhancement and then create a bounty on BountySource under the https://www.bountysource.com/teams/rainlab team for the issue you created. 👍

[lunfel]

@LukeTowers Didn't know that! Maybe it should be put more in sight? I don't know, I may have been living under a rock all this time.

[LukeTowers]

@lunfel any suggestions for how we can improve the visibility of that?

[LukeTowers]

OctoberCMS Swag

Offer OctoberCMS swag (tshirts, mugs, stickers, etc.) for sale online

[robballantyne]

Agency Recruitment Campaign

I 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.

[ed320]

Improved Partner Program

In 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.

[alvaro-canepa]

Marketplace Packages

Adding a new section in Marketplace to offer packages of plugins/themes, something like public Projects.
At now, plugins has dependency, but Authors can offer their plugins in a package with discount or maybe for free packages, just to help end users, to have a complete (one install) suite of eCommerce, Real Estate, Website, Blog, Forum, or whatever...
It would be great if plugins in package can be pre-configured (if is needed).

[ghost]

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).

[LukeTowers]

@Alex360hd @errantquill @onurguven what's the reason for the thumbs down on managed hosting and recurring licenses?

[ghost]

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).

[LukeTowers]

@Alex360hd is the media manager revamp something that your company would be interested in sponsoring?

[ghost]

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).

[LukeTowers]

@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 ;)

[ErrantQuill]

@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.

[LukeTowers]

@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.

[ErrantQuill]

@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.
To be honest, I have not actually used any plugin besides the Users and Location plugins; the very reason I took up October is the ease of extensibility using plugins so I tend to just make whatever is needed. October makes things pretty easy anyway, and any client who has enough of a time crunch to warrant buying ready-made plugins better be ready to pony up. Just please keep the RainLab essentials free :D

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.

[ghost]

Job / Freelance Marketplace

Personally 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!

[petehalverson]

October CMS Conference

Start a conference. Sell tickets and sponsorships.

[w20k]

October CMS Paid Tutorials/Lessons from Nooby to OctoNinja

Create a tutorials/lessons for beginners and advanced Users. Really would love to have 'tips & tricks' from the core team, to know all the goodies.

[GrCOTE7]

//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) :

• Where he has stopped the last time he studied
• What he must still study

Hoping you have understood what I mean, my english is so bad...

[robinbonnes]

We would also pay for an extended licence for a good visual page builder (like the one you teased before abandon it).

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 ...

[Thejuse]

Marketplace bundles

It would be a cool idea that you can make bundles for everyone with plugins/Themes and you can buy it (if there are payed plugins) and you can add it if there are free Plugins.

e.g
StartPackage

• rainlab-pages
• rainlab-blog
• rainlab-sitemap
• renatio-seomanager

That can be a QuickStart Package for sites and you can install it easy and fast

[LukeTowers]

@Thejuse I appreciate the contribution, it's been suggested above here: https://github.com/octobercms/october/issues/3683#issuecomment-412022173

[RedMarlin]

I have prepared a simplified SWAT analysis, target market analysis and explanations of my reasoning here: https://redmarlin.net/storage/app/media/temp/october_revenue_streams-2.pdf

Below I will just write a short summary of the above document (it would be too much if I pasted the whole text here;)).

October Target
Freelance developers, agencies and in house developers working in bigger organizations.
October business model should be definitely b2b centered.

October weak sides that need to be addressed asap

• Too small user base/community
• Not enough advertising
• Not enough advertising materials for developers: case studies, usage cases, speed comparisons/tests etc.
• Not enough points of contact, read NO FORUM!

Advice
Adopt Revenue streams that can help build the product and further grow the community. Do not search revenue by means that are not scaling easily.

• Crowd founding campaign. Bug Bounty are fine for b2c relations but they are to vague for business to make a decision about contributing. Make few campaigns to fix bundle of bugs or add new functionality, write more detailed documentation or do 3rd party security audit. But give exact numbers: how much you need to do those tasks, time frame for funding campaign and time frame for the work to be done.
• Conference as proposed by @petehalverson but do it online to make it easier and cheaper to prepare
• Tutorials as proposed by @w20k - Simply a great idea

[ghost]

Just do an ICO,

The people behind the project will become millionaire's and they can then hire a proper team to develop this project more quickly!

I have seen so many BS projects out there that have done an ICO and raised huge amounts of capital and their code is totally rubbish, where you could put something together in a single day! At least with October the code is good and already done!

You can also create an October Token/Coin for the Marketplace where you can get discounts on plugins and themes if you pay using that Token/Coin.

As for adverts, why spoil everyone's User Experience and have you ever heard of Ad-Blocker's as most of the web is moving towards that direction now! It's not the 90's anymore.

Seriously, who here wants to see the October Website or the CMS plastered with adverts that will slow down the loading and give you a poorer UX! That will just annoy your little user base you have already. Take Facebook, people are totally fed up with all their adverts!

If you want to raise Capital for your project either do an ICO or go talk to some venture capitalists!

"October CMS ICO - The next gen professional cms"

[frthjf]

Enable pay what you want for free plugins with 50% or higher marketplace gratuity

I'm the author of some free plugins. The reason I've decided to make them free is not that I don't think that they aren't worth any money but because being an admin of a NGO websites I know that not everyone can always effort plugin prices. On the other hand, there are always people who can effort good money if you nudge them to do so. Hence, I think a pay-what-you-want model with high marketplace gratuity would be a great feature. elementary OS has applied this model quite successfully I think; have a look at the website for a UI demo (type 0 dollar into the field next to Purchase).

If we give free-plugin authors the option to switch their plugin to pay-what-you-want without sacrificing the free availability it might generate more revenue for October because users to perceive these plugins as necessary 'free'. I'd be willing to give my free plugins a pay-what-you-want price and hand 100% over to October as marketplace gratuity.

[CptMeatball]

October CMS Paid Tutorials/Lessons from Nooby to OctoNinja

Create a tutorials/lessons for beginners and advanced Users. Really would love to have 'tips & tricks' from the core team, to know all the goodies.

Not sure what I think about this. OctoberCMS isn't a big boy yet and this might slow down user adoption in favour of more money.

[AugmentBLU]

If October was a bit more "in-line" with how Laravel are doing things then you may find the CMS getting better traction. More users could mean more revenue in the market place etc. Half the ideas here are missing the point and seems heavily based on selling something, it won't work. You need regular donations and funding from developers and business that use the product but if the CMS is not in-tune with what devs need, what Laravel devs expect then the user-base is going to be stagnant.

I for one am losing the love for OC, too many useful Laravel functions and packages are incompatible out the box with OC. It might be great to show that OC have their own way of doing things but it's becoming incredibly irritating developing workarounds or seeing that Laravel can do something and it's impossible without a massive amount of hacks, for it to mess up after an update. I'm sure some will say to make your own but clients and business want stuff that's already available, well supported and implemented fairly quickly.

I know it sounds very critical, I do think OC is a great CMS but it is lacking some core things that Laravel makes great use of. Bloated or not, fact is that businesses want the bells and whistles and want their devs to produce without a mass of hurdles.

[LukeTowers]

@AugmentBLU Do you have specific examples and are you willing to put your money where your mouth is and sponsor some of these desired features?

[AugmentBLU]

@LukeTower Specific examples include not being able to use Laravel packages such as Passport, Echo, Spark due to the completely different auth methods used or without complex changes that are not easily managed with updates. New comers are not able to use the vast majority of packages or tutorials out there due to differing methods even with a great amount of hacks.

We've discussed in the past about having OC auth looked at and yes I have offered to part-sponsor but I alone am not able to fund it - what would it take to get an idea of how much would be required in funding?

I maybe in a minority needing these features in the current OC user-base but it's possibly putting off those who are existing Laravel devs from wanting to adopt the platform as they won't be able to take full advantage of existing packages. I'm not saying that all Laravel stuff is amazing but at least it's decently coded and supported and could open up the platform for wider adoption.

What if the codebase allowed for use of reputable and well supported Laravel packages like Passport or Spark? I'm sure better quality plugins for APIs, Payment or Socket integration would be available on the marketplace rather than the badly coded stuff currently there. There's a handful of well developed plugins but there's so many that either don't work or are unsupported.

[LukeTowers]

@AugmentBLU So your main gripe is still with the Auth system differences :)

It would probably take me a day of research to figure out how we could integrate the Laravel auth system without breaking the current API that October exposes of roles, permissions, and the auth manager classes.

If people were willing to commit to a $1500 USD bounty to get it fully implemented (payable only on actual completion of the project of course) then I'd be willing to look into it. Besides that, it's always an option to do all of that research and implementation work yourself and then make a PR to share it with everyone else and shift the maintenance burden onto the core maintainers.

[AugmentBLU]

@LukeTowers It sure is. Anything Laravel seems to be so heavily dependant on its own methods that any stray from that is becoming near impossible to use.

Do you think off the top of your head that an implementation of a new Auth system would allow for straight forward integration of packages outlined above?

If so, I would put forward $500 of the required funds.

[LukeTowers]

@AugmentBLU it should, although it's still not going to do anything about packages that don't support LTS versions of Laravel (i.e. 5.5), and we're unlikely to change our stance on that unless people are willing to regularly pay us for the hassle of upgrading Laravel versions and all of the polyfills / testing we have to do to ensure that the core remains stable.

[AugmentBLU]

@LukeTowers I think most of the current packages are compatible with L5.5 (Spark, Passport, Echo at least) so it would be a decent starting point for aligning the Auth system. If a none LTS release came out and there were enough people wanting the upgrade, I'm sure those wanting it bad enough can donate - I would be one.

In your honest opinion, do you think OC would benefit from the Auth system being in-line with Laravel? I personally see it as a good thing, just wonder what you think.

[Ladylain]

@LukeTowers I created a new paid plugin and I found that the gratitude is still 30%, but as I am happy to develop with OctoberCMS, I would like to increase the gratitude because I think it is important to support you. You could perhaps let the authors increase the gratitude on the plugin page. What do you think of that ?

[pvullioud]

Improve partners onboarding

• Add prices on https://octobercms.com/partners or on a separate page
• Tweet announcement for new partners
• Campaign to find new partners on the site heading

[Teranode]

@LukeTowers @AugmentBLU why not just look at my package tho https://github.com/Teranode/october-laravel-auth-bridge - It works for me, i can use laravel's Auth, Passport. Ive been using it for several months now with no issue.

Then when i need to extend the auth at any point i do this

    public function register()
    {
        app('auth')->extend('session.auth', function($app, $name, array $config)
        {
            $provider = $this->app['auth']->createUserProvider($config['provider']);
            $guard = new \Batotwo\User\Classes\SessionManager($name, $provider, $app['session.store']);
            return $guard;
        });

        app()->singleton('redirect', function ($app) {
            // overrides with our own extended version of Redirector to support
            // seperate url.intended session variable for frontend
            $redirector = new UserRedirector($app['url']);

            // If the session is set on the application instance, we'll inject it into
            // the redirector instance. This allows the redirect responses to allow
            // for the quite convenient "with" methods that flash to the session.
            if (isset($app['session.store'])) {
                $redirector->setSession($app['session.store']);
            }

            return $redirector;
        });

        /*
         * Apply user-based mail blocking
         */
        Event::listen('mailer.prepareSend', function($mailer, $view, $message) {
            return MailBlocker::filterMessage($view, $message);
        });

        /*
         * Compatability with RainLab.Notify
         */
        $this->bindNotificationEvents();
    }

gist of SessionManager: https://gist.github.com/Teranode/fd585fc223f705c696f242c77b444bf8 - ignore the permissions, that's front-end permissions

[Teranode]

The only gripe i have with october right now is that i cant force my way out of LTS 5.5 without creating a fork and using that fork.

[LucasZdv]

Hello, I would like you to consider adding a wallet in the marketplace of octobercms.com to be able to reinvest the money obtained from our plugins, in the purchase of other plugins or plugins advertising. This seems like a good idea to promote the internal market of october and not only withdraw the money, in this way they can also use statistics to manage more funds for the project.

[alvaro-canepa]

Hello, I would like you to consider adding a wallet in the marketplace of octobercms.com to be able to reinvest the money obtained from our plugins, in the purchase of other plugins or plugins advertising. This seems like a good idea to promote the internal market of october and not only withdraw the money, in this way they can also use statistics to manage more funds for the project.

Also we can offer newest, rewrited plugins by free for buyer of oldest versions.

[LucasZdv]

Hello, I would like you to consider adding a wallet in the marketplace of octobercms.com to be able to reinvest the money obtained from our plugins, in the purchase of other plugins or plugins advertising. This seems like a good idea to promote the internal market of october and not only withdraw the money, in this way they can also use statistics to manage more funds for the project.

Also we can offer newest, rewrited plugins by free for buyer of oldest versions.

Buyers already receive updates

[alvaro-canepa]

@LucasZdv sorry, I mean something like offer other plugins for free or with discount for buyers. Example, I have a plugin "X", and publish a new plugin "Y", all that buy "X" can download "Y" for free. "Y" can be a new version of "X" or an extended version.

[drmzio]

Ads Across October Website

Let people pay for ad placement across the entire October website (forum, blogs, marketplace, homepage, etc...) HOWEVER ads must be on or related to OctoberCMS (e.g. development/design services, plugin/theme beta testing, etc..)

No Google Ads, or other third-party advertising.

[LukeTowers]

@drmzio ads are already present on the marketplace pages and as a Partner. I'm not sure I'd see the value in having ads anywhere else on the site. I appreciate your input though.

[bennothommo]

Yearly "Best of October" competition

Run a yearly competition celebrating the best websites built on October CMS, with the potential for several categories of judging (ie. Best designed site, best plugin, people's choice etc.). The revenue could be generated as a registration fee for each site submitted as an entrant (perhaps $10-$50 per entry), with the revenue pool providing the cash prizes and some funding to October.

Entrants get the benefit of having their site shown in the Entrants list which will provide some traffic back to their site for the length of time the competition is in progress.

The competition is also a good avenue for a sponsorship deal to promote a business alongside the competition - ie. The 2019 October CMS Awards, sponsored by \

[prhost]

Donate page to develop new functionality

Make a page similar to the donation page, but for good ideas that need a fundraising amount to be developed, similar to what happened here https://github.com/octobercms/october/issues/2772

Sometimes some features need money to be developed, but we do not know exactly how much to donate, who better to say when they need to develop each idea and a system where several can share this burden? (:

[joe-conigliaro]

I have a suggestion, although it's not directly about revenue raising.
Could you try and grow the core development team? To help spread the burden, that way more will get done without it coming down to money. I think you guys deserve to make money where possible, but this is an open source project and it deserves to reach it's full potential.

[LukeTowers]

@joe-conigliaro we have been, @w20k and @bennothommo have recently joined us as core & RainLab plugin maintainers, @mjauvin has taken on maintaining RainLab.Translate, and we're seeing increased contributions from our community which is great.

Having @w20k and @bennothommo helping out has been fantastic so far, reduced the load and pressure on me quite a bit. We still need to come up with solid revenue generating sources for October however in order to ensure that this project continues going strong and grows even more.

[joe-conigliaro]

@joe-conigliaro we have been, @w20k and @bennothommo have recently joined us as core & RainLab plugin maintainers, @mjauvin has taken on maintaining RainLab.Translate, and we're seeing increased contributions from our community which is great.

Having @w20k and @bennothommo helping out has been fantastic so far, reduced the load and pressure on me quite a bit. We still need to come up with solid revenue generating sources for October however in order to ensure that this project continues going strong and grows even more.

That's great to hear, October is such a good project. I've been using it since the early days I always used to be in the irc channel. It's really a pleasure to use compared to others which i won't name. I just want to see it grow and do well.

[SaifurRahmanMohsin]

Introduce Widgets Marketplace:

Widgets are components that can be re-used across multiple plugins. However, the OctoberCMS system is designed in a way that plugins have widgets inside them--so if you want a plugin needs a widget that's in another plugin it needs the entire plugin as a dependency. While this is great esp. when a plugin might need a particular widget only within in or has configurable fields which the plugin implements, there should also be an option to load widgets from a marketplace since there are several widgets that work across plugins and can be standalone ones. The October core does have some commonly used widgets that can be used across forms, lists, etc. but I'm suggestion widgets made by plugin developers. For example, ReCaptcha should ideally be a generic widget, or RainLab's location plugin adds an address finder form widget which can be used across various plugins and in forms. A developer who is developing say a contacts form app and wants a places autofill field could load this widget into their app.

Just like the plugins market, a widget market can be introduced where authors can host their free and paid widgets. The OctoberCMS team can draw a gratuity from the paid widgets for this too.

There was a plugin that enables loading widgets this way and was made long back but it's unmaintained and some of the widgets are broken. I had contributed a widget to this but I cannot update it because the person who made this was the one maintaining even the widgets submitted by other users. I think it's best to re-write the code as part of the core so that widgets can be downloaded from a global repository. Also, the widget marketplace would be for developers to buy rather than end-users so this also opens up OctoberCMS to profiting from developers besides from the plugin gratuity alone.

Expected Features

• [ ] Widgets should be able to classify themselves as either generic, forms or reports (dashboard) in the marketplace itself.
• [ ] Widgets need to have the ability to have their own configuration, assets and load it's own composer dependencies.
• [ ] Ideally, all widget listing should be enforced to have an animated gif or a static image that demonstrates how it works--this would be the best case to help developers pick the right widgets or understand how it works.

[LukeTowers]

@SaifurRahmanMohsin what you're talking about is already possible simply by making plugins that only contain one widget in them. See https://github.com/captive/oc-calendar-plugin & https://github.com/captive/oc-notes-plugin. This does have the downside of paid widgets requiring be paid for by the end users though. I'm not sure there's enough demand to sustain developing a paid "widgets" section of the marketplace where only plugin developers that use those widgets have to pay for them.

Perhaps a scheme where required plugins that are paid plugins are automatically added to the list / purchase price of the plugin requiring it?

[shoxabbos]

Add another payment methods to the market place.

Because in many countries paypal is not working. And users can't buy plugins, themes

[w20k]

@shoxabbos Stripe was added: https://www.facebook.com/octobercms/posts/2490826301030818

[FlusherDock1]

Extend the partners program.

At the moment, the affiliate program does not carry any benefit for the web agency itself, except for the link on the October website or the author's icon in the marketplace.

As an option: add discounts in the marketplace for templates or plugins to partners who have already paid for the affiliate. Make very cheap ($ 1 or $ 5) plugins free, and etc.

But increase the cost of the affiliate program, and make it at least for 2-3 months.

I think the web developers themselves really want to help the project, but the owners of the agencies do not always understand the benefits of the icon in the marketplace.

[LukeTowers]

@FlusherDock1

As an option: add discounts in the marketplace for templates or plugins to partners who have already paid for the affiliate. Make very cheap ($ 1 or $ 5) plugins free, and etc.

That's essentially stealing from the marketplace developers since they are the ones that receive the bulk of those payments. The best that we could do is reduce the cost of plugin to exactly what the author receives (so without the gratuities) but then that starts costing us money. Do you have any other ideas for things that could make the partner program more attractive? Dedicated support time with the maintainers perhaps?

[FlusherDock1]

@LukeTowers

That's essentially stealing from the marketplace developers since they are the ones that receive the bulk of those payments.

Not exactly, I just did not develop this topic to the end to convey the basic idea.

The authors will receive their 70% after the sale, but they will receive money not from the buyer (agency) but from October itself.

The cost of cheap plug-ins or themes will be invested in the cost of the affiliate program that the agencies will pay monthly.

The second idea is a subscription system to the marketplace like Patreon.

[ghost]

To me, the best way to make some more money with October CMS is to develop the private plugin repository system. I work in an agency and it would be really useful to us to be able to upload our custom private plugins to october website and put them in projects, in order to install them all with just few clicks.

I see that it's the most voted feature of that topic, I think many agencies (mine included) would be happy to pay a reccuring monthly fee for that. You should put a developper on this feature ASAP, and then, an accountant to calculate profits 👍

[FlusherDock1]

@PubliAlex just store plugins in your repository, clone it to october install and do:
php artisan october:up

[SaifurRahmanMohsin]

@LukeTowers

That's essentially stealing from the marketplace developers since they are the ones that receive the bulk of those payments.

Not exactly, I just did not develop this topic to the end to convey the basic idea.

The authors will receive their 70% after the sale, but they will receive money not from the buyer (agency) but from October itself.

The cost of cheap plug-ins or themes will be invested in the cost of the affiliate program that the agencies will pay monthly.

The second idea is a subscription system to the marketplace like Patreon.

I have to agree with @LukeTowers on this. The reason OctoberCMS is more attractive as a choice is because of the plugin eco-system it comes with. It enables independent freelance developers like me from countries like India to make side money thro' plugins. I market OctoberCMS actively as a consequence of it coz pushing it means pushing my plugins as well. OctoberCMS has been designed as a platform that allows me to get paid via plugins (and there are many free plugins that I published too). This business model is similar to Apple’s app store, Google play store, etc. Both these companies built an OS that’s extremely good and gave the OS for free along with a marketplace but charge for any hardware they sell with the OS preloaded and also feature their own paid as well as free apps (like Responsiv/RainLab does) as well to let developers out there publish and make money. The developers market for them and so it’s what I call a WIN-WIN scenario. So I don't think it would ever be a good idea to cut from the developers ability to make money. I already feel that 30% is a higher gratuity and would have set it at 20% if possible but there isn't an option but that's okay still since I get all these other things such as the full uptime marketplace/options to schedule discount coupons/decent community/support from the October team in case of issues with reviews (just last week I had a bad review by a user for my Social plugin coz he faced a bug with one of the login providers and made a bad review instead of raising a support issue and I reported it for the October team to remove it and fixed the bug--they did and I'm pleased with the outcome) which helps make my passive income.

From my understanding, a person pays for affiliate program and becomes a partner in the hope that it would be to increase the visibility of their plugins/themes and thereby improves their sales. If you make their products free then they essentially make no money which kind of goes against the reason they paid for it to begin with.

[FlusherDock1]

@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:
The author publishes plugin for 15$ in the marketplace. October revenue will be 30%.

If any random user buys a plugin, he will pay $ 15, which will be __divided between the author and the marketplace__.
All I am saying is to remove the share of the marketplace from the price for partners who are already paying for the affiliate program. The author will still receive a share without any abbreviations.

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.

[FlusherDock1]

Move the donation section to the main page

https://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.

[LukeTowers]

@FlusherDock1

but from the marketplace itself.

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.

[FlusherDock1]

@LukeTowers

it has the potential to actively hurt our financial situation

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.

[SaifurRahmanMohsin]

@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.

[drmzio]

OctoberCMS Swag

Offer OctoberCMS swag (tshirts, mugs, stickers, etc.) for sale online

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.

[LukeTowers]

@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.

[danielbidala]

IMPROVING MARKETING STRATEGY

More 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

[w20k]

@danielbidala @LukeTowers made few changes to the OCMS description, pretty much, it's a CMF now:

October is a Content Management Framework (CMF) and web platform whose sole purpose is to make your development workflow simple again. It was born out of frustration with existing systems. We feel building websites has become a convoluted and confusing process that leaves developers unsatisfied. We want to turn you around to the simpler side and get back to basics.
https://github.com/octobercms/october

[danielbidala]

@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:

• Relation manager, relation handling (it is absolute outstanding function)
• CRUD operations for models
• Model filtering system
• Backend user and permission management
• Available field types
• Easy to use ajax interface for backend plugins
• and so on...

[LukeTowers]

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!

[SebastiaanKloos]

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👍

[mrgswift]

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.

[mrgswift]

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.

[LukeTowers]

@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 :)

[briddle]

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.

[briddle]

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.

• Include private themes and plugin hosting (already done, great!)
• Offer partners a dedicated forum channel that only offers priority support by the core team and other partners. Companies that share a real business interest in getting support.
• Offer partners access to a support ticketing system (billed monthly for supporttickets used). Maybe create support tickets with different priorities for different prices? (that would be an awesome feature bringing the best of commercial software to October: commercial support).

[tobias-kuendig]

Maybe you could sign up here?

https://github.blog/2019-11-13-universe-day-one/#sponsors

[LukeTowers]

@tobias-kuendig huh, neat. We don't have a corporate entity AFAIK, but I'll mention it to @daftspunk

[SaifurRahmanMohsin]

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.

[LukeTowers]

@SaifurRahmanMohsin it already is, see the first comment:

OpenCollective: See https://opencollective.com/octobercms

[ayumi-cloud]

Credit @Samuell1 adding his suggestion,

I like to see if ocms can make something like Flare does but for free because to use Flare you need to pay monthly.

I would be happy to pay october $20 a month for this service etc.

https://flareapp.io/

[LukeTowers]

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!

[multiwebinc]

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.