Scott

Many 3rd-party devs are navigating a strange space these days with the closure of the MP. And it's not just me.

Missing comms, missed connections, I emailed you here but you are not there you are here instead so this is a week behind and etc... We're all getting up to speed on the new normal. 

Most of us are "missing" on the IPS boards as well. Most devs I know have stepped back from there - not necessarily intentionally, its just that "right now" there isn't much there for us. 4x is development EOL, there is no MP for us to submit to or support topics to keep up on, and we have no alpha/beta of 5x to yell about yet (though I am hopeful for something before the year is out).

I still need to onboard a ton of people and get old purchases added. Yep yep yep.

As a small gift of contrition, get you some free seasonal snowflakes here - zero browser CPU impact, otherwise I would not have humped it over for you guys to use so grab it and annoy/amuse/placate your users!

Crazy two weeks, I'll be hitting verifications and adding purchases in the morning.

Yeah that's a strange one. Your member group has unlimited messages but was set at zero per minute sending. No idea...

Feel free to start throwing them at me.

As for the last week or two, unplanned car work - and those nice videos showing you how to do it in warm well provisioned garages with full lifts and clean cars does not match the experience of a frozen garage floor and grimy 20 year old 4x4. 

Looks like my direct-server emails were about 50/50 for acceptance rate which... not great. Email can be the biggest pain in the...

I flipped to SendGrid short term and re-sent any not-responded-to registration emails (and SendGrid is working fine, I got the test emails from the ACP). Longer term I'll move emails over to MXroute which, frankly, is awfully inexpensive and bullet-proof; created and ran by someone who gives a damn and is focused on server folks like us. Another option if you need a cheap/free service is smtp2go

Speaking of which, I haven't received any registration emails from your end either (for my verification stuff). Granted, I know pretty much all of you registering now so I could verify you manually, but if you have set up an account for me, I haven't gotten those emails just like you haven't mine. Might want to poke that bear...

Reminder that only verified members can purchase/download premium files.

Guests will not seen the link but registered members (Ground Control) and above will. Link is up top and cannot be missed.

Add your site, your IPS profile link, and create an All Astronauts account on your site WITHOUT PASSWORD so I get the "set your password" email and that's that. Wait for me to check check it and that's it.

See the verification link for all the details and thanks for making the Invision Community app-space more secure!

1) No one renews.

This was... not great. Ideally renewals are constant and end-users understand that the renewals provide support and further development and features but that never seems to be the case.

Over the multi-year lifetime of an app/plugin in the IPS Marketplace, users never renewed unless they were absolutely required. That meant breaking-changes in Invision Community things forcing upgrades to compatible 3rd-party wares. IPS even experiences this with people skipping renewals for significant amounts of time and then punching upgrades years later (and I'm guilty of that as well for one rather static site of mine). If you were to put me on the spot, I'd say across all my stuff maybe 5%-10% of purchasers regularly renewed on schedule. And? I'd take the under on that.

2) The IPS Marketplace did not let us apply adjusted renewal fees to prior purchases.

This was rough. Things I made that had serious expanded features in later versions were being renewed for a couple of bucks in some cases and many people skipped those renewals even at that low amount. Not entirely sure why this was the case as IPS adjusted pricing and renewals a few times on their products but alas that never applied to our things. Might have been (is?) a limitation of INVCOM Downloads. I should look one day...

3) This will work but actually no it won't.

So, now that I'm handling everything on this side, I've wrestled with how to manage this conundrum. At first I was going to price purchases a little higher (chargebacks and all that are on me now so...) and then set renewals less than before but at 4-month intervals and then craft up a checking mechanism such that if you missed x-amount of renewals you would need to re-buy.

That, after some further thought, does not solve the problem I was trying to fix. Higher purchase prices would discourage buys and even forcing re-buys with too many missed renewals, the lower renewal prices would still see people gaming the system and hitting renewals every 3rd or 4th time to not have to re-buy. 

Also I'd have to write something to monitor renewals and all that and I got enough to work on already.

4) So it's come to this...

My solution: lower prices to buy, higher prices (than before) to renew, retain the shorter renewal period. People will still skip renewals but the shorter renewal period and higher renewal costs will mitigate skips. This "flattens" the whole thing. Not quite re-buy every time but sort-of, kind-of near that. Instead of waiting a year or more to upgrade and getting patches and new features for $5, now you will have to pay more for the upgrades and there will mostly be no getting around that. I still do not expect people to regularly renew, though it would very much be appreciated if you did. If you are running a corporate or well-funded site it would be rather nice...

Longer term, building out a descending renewal platform is at least a glimmer in my eye. JetBrains does this now with their software: purchase price, then a yearly renewal. If you keep up with renewals, each subsequent renewal decreases to an eventual base line. Skip any renewals and it's a re-buy. It's a very nice carrot, with an obvious stick behind it. Right now not do-able with the INVCOM Downloads/Commerce platform as-is.

None of this is ideal, but neither is people giving me $5 every two years.

5) You don't expect us to renew?

Yes and no. If you can, please do, regularly.

Otherwise, for years the renewal pattern has been only when necessary or a new wanted feature appears.

When I defaulted to six months, I would get a renewal every year or two years per license. Push me on that and I would take the over. Compatability with new INVCOM versions was the primary driver.

So now I'm dropping the purchase prices but also shortening the renewal terms and increasing those prices at the same time. Just like I said above.

Reminder: 4x things will not transfer to 5x. Everybody will need buy the new stuff. Given the relative nearness of initial 5x things the prices of all 4x premium stuff has been reduced.

Support, questions, bug reports here.

Support, questions, bug reports here.

Support, questions, bug reports here.

With the Marketplace gone I'm pretty much forced to de-lurk and go legit/official. I've been doing private dev and support work for years and years; I just never, EVER, marked myself as a provider on the IPS website. Given the new reality I either come out from the dark side of the moon and yell "Over here!" or let everything go, so here we are.

Expect renewal prices for my applications and plugins to synchronize around a single term. It will either be six months or four months and I'm leaning towards four months (prices adjusted accordingly).

Those of you who bought stuff years and years ago should be aware that you will be getting the more recent renewal rates on my stuff. One long-term hitch with the now-former IPS Marketplace is that an author could change the renewal rates for an application/plugin but any previous purchases would never take on the new rate. So some of y'all out there are throwing me $5 every six months ($4 when I got it) for stuff that has way-evolved over the years. And that is assuming people actually paid renewals regularly.

Also, please, do understand that no one, and I mean NO ONE, made anything approaching "bank" on the Marketplace. 30,000+ Invision Community installs (and growing) and the most successful applications and plugins top out at 100+ purchases (freebies might see a couple thousand downloads). I made maybe $100-$200 a month on average and I was probably doing better than average for the MP. No one is living on that. It was that way in the 3x days as well, though old hands may remember Advanced Tags and Prefixes from back then. That author probably pulled in north of $10,000 over the lifetime of that application but that was over a period of years so adjust accordingly. I suspect themers did better overall.

Enough blithering; this should be an article anyways but that default "Welcome" forum post was bothering me.