Thread: selling plugins
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Old 05-17-2012, 10:38 AM   #18
A_SN
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2011
Posts: 89
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I'm a bit late to the party, but then again when this thread was started I didn't have a plugin yet.

I solved the free plugin dilemma by making my plugin (a LP EQ, SplineEQ) both free (but limited in some ways, but not CBing like a demo, still usable, just limited) and commercial. The free version is limited as in it has less bands than the full version (4 instead of 60) and you can't load or save presets in the plugin's proprietary format. I sold about 300 licenses (though only about 123 outside of mass discounts) in 5 months (but more importantly it made me sell a lot of my other program) and it's ranking #3 on KVR so I guess the strategy works okay. I think I'm gonna stick to the free+commercial formula for mostly everything in the future since it makes the plugin pretty popular and against my expectations there's a pretty good rate of free to commercial conversions (last I measured it was about 37 to 1). You really have to make sure that the free version/demo cannot be cracked into a full version. That means don't freely distributed something that can be activated, you want to have separate builds for the free and full version, so that the code that makes the full version is missing from the free version's binary.

The keys to the 'success' here is my plugin is very good, it's also very cheap (the way I see it if you're not a big name you need to apply a no-name penalty to your price tag so that you may be as competitive as the big names you compete with, I'm talking $19 against $99) and I try to talk about it on Gearslutz and KVR and keep it in the news. No matter how good it is it'll never sell itself, well, never well enough. In my experience you don't even have to worry about SEO, that won't help, you need to find ways to put it into people's face really. Oh and of course you have to try and fix what people want you to fix, not necessarily in the way they tell you to fix it but in a way that will satisfy them. Fixing the plugin continuously and talking about ways to fix it with people keeps people talking about it, and releasing updates keeps it in the news. I don't really have any marketing strategy though, which is a shame.

Oh and I got pirated only once, didn't do much of a dent in my sales, and since then the pirate group disbanded lol. Oh and I do make a living solely from selling Photosounder and SplineEQ, though it is a modest living, modest enough that I'm gonna move to a cheaper (but sunnier) island to better enjoy the little money I make lol.

Last edited by A_SN; 05-17-2012 at 02:16 PM.
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