Getting paid

Nothing is sold through the marketplace. It has no accounts, no billing and no payouts, and it takes no cut of anything. What it lists is installed by name from your repository, under your licence, and money between you and whoever uses it is yours to arrange. This page exists so the intent is written down before any mechanism is, rather than announced afterwards.

What your instance can do today

Taking money is a plugin, not a marketplace feature. stripe provides payments@1 and writes customers, subscriptions and payments into collections your app queries like any other, and polar and lemonsqueezy take payments through it. Each is an official plugin you add by name from the marketplace, and setting the provider's key is what turns one on, and @voidbase-cloud/sdk/payments is the client side. That is an instance charging its own users for its own product. The plugins page has the three.

What is promised

• You keep what you earn. If you publish something worth paying for, you should be able to charge for it. Building a marketplace rather than a plugin directory is what that sentence costs.
• We would rather take sponsorship than a percentage. The plan is for the marketplace to be paid for by people who want the ecosystem to exist, not by a cut of everyone inside it.
• Official plugins and themes stay free. As many as we can write. An ecosystem does not start behind a paywall, and free official ones are what makes a paid third-party one worth writing.
• Nothing that is free becomes paid. If a subscription ever appears it covers a basket of specialised official plugins and themes, and specialised is doing the work in that sentence.

The same commitments from the other side, along with what voidbase itself costs, are on the pricing page. If creators are ever able to charge through the marketplace, it will be written down there before it is built.

What is not decided

Quite a lot, and it is better to say so than to imply a design exists.

• How money would move: which payment provider, who the merchant of record is, and therefore who carries the tax obligation.
• What could be charged for. A one-off price, a subscription, per-instance, or something else entirely.
• Whether a paid listing needs a licence check, and what happens to an instance when a subscription lapses.
• Refunds, disputes, and what happens when a paid plugin stops being maintained.

If this matters to you

Say so now rather than later. Someone who intends to earn from this has opinions about the list above that we do not, and the order those questions get answered in should be set by the people affected. Discord is the fastest way, and this page is where the answers land once there are any.