Devot-ee Offers Timed Downloads & Changes Revenue Share

Ryan Masuga gave a sort of State of the State of Devot-ee & EE Add-on Development today on the website’s blog.

He introduced two major changes to how Devot-ee operates:

• Add-on sellers will be able to impose a download time limit on all purchases.
• Devot-ee is moving to a 70/30 revenue split with sellers.

Both make sense to me.

The timed downloads help address the ongoing support issue for add-ons. Effectively, a customer can purchase the add-on once and then the developers are on the hook for support for, well, forever.

The developers’ only recourse for recouping their time spent on add-on development is to release a paid upgrade version. They still have to support 1.0 of an add-on that is on 5.0. Not sustainable. Devot-ee is giving them a tool to try to help.

The revenue share is between add-on developers and Devot-ee. If you deem it too steep (it’s not), then you are not obligated to sell. Some add-on developers make the choice to sell add-ons exclusively on their own. Some others make the choice to sell exclusively through Devot-ee.

There was a good series of conversations on Twitter today about this. I am preserving as many as possible using Storify before they disappear into the dark canyons of Twitter.

Before you chime in, hear Ryan out. Read his post here.