Extensions prices

Wadera

I know that's each developer should ask for whatever they want to get pay for their work
So please don't judge devs on this topic!!! They are amazing people who spend their time and knowledge to support great project named Flarum 😉

All bellow are just my personal observations - person who administrative few small, non profit forums for free to help friends or local communities.

When you have few premium extensions

Prices adds so quickly!
You can easily get prices like $30-50 per month! That's crazy that to get proper forum software you need pay for so much 3rd party premium extensions to get basic functionality (websocket, audit logs, cache, rewrite url paths, even maintenance mode!) - especially if you managing small community forum... That put us in situation when we need to choose between extensions which we want to use

Friends of Flarum

They are awesome people whogathering and supporting so many free extensions! That's a shame that we have so few people who supporting them 🙁

Maybe...

Imho - basic functionality which are not included into the core - should be sell on really cheap price to get "scale" money and popularise Flarum engine. Premium prices should be reserved to plugins which really help to run huge forums and make money with proper support - example - SEO, Marketing links, some shop integration maybe? Or to get premium support if someone want to get something, but have not enough technical knowledge.

Looking at Extiverse premium plugins stats - most extensions have just few subscribers

Maybe it's related to some strict budget which admins set for themselves? For example - if you want spent no more than $50 yearly for small, game friend forum / local club etc - then you need to choose wisely which extension / group of people you will support. That's sad that you need to choose between supporting FoF or getting working audit log for example

Maybe single, centralised extension marketplace will be helpful? Currently you can easily to get lost on options like FoF, Flagrow or Extiverse... On top of that - if you using hosting like https://www.freeflarum.com/ it's become even more messy... I'm sure that if you have free hosting and there will be shop which allow easily get some pro functionalities like - get own domain or install pro extensions - some communities will choose that option! Let's say model when you pay for extension inside freeflarum and some % come to hosting company and other to extension author?

Can we do something about it? I'm sure that it's better to get 600 subscribers with price like $2 per year than 5 subscribers with $5 per month thinking that if they paid $5 then they should get 24/7 premium support... Scale is always something which help grow faster and make money - example: Wordpress, Proxmox or multiple other project which make a ton of money on paid support or certifications instead of charging for a product itself.

[deleted]

Wadera I'm a consumer of various premium extensions for my forum, and whilst I agree that the annual cost can easily spiral, the premium offerings are in fact no different to other similar products in the sense that providing everything for free just isn't sustainable.

For example, if an extension takes 5 hours to develop and is relatively simple, I personally wouldn't charge for it. However, if an extension takes hundreds of hours to develop, maintain, and ultimately support once it is fit for production usage, then this really shouldn't be free, and it's not fair on that developer to be expected to offer all of this for free (in my view).

The extensions (I hope) will be more competitively priced in the sense that there are one-time purchase payments available. Whilst this is palatable from the consumer perspective, it is the end of the revenue stream for the developer themselves for that particular transaction - as they do not charge for support (ever), the only time they will have any financial incentive to further enhance and support their work is if they are recieving some form of payment. FoF for example have released an impressive array of extensions which are all free, and all very well supported - and have a very large user base.

What we also need to be mindful of is that if it were not for the tireless work of the core devs, the core itself which is required to even run these extensions would not exist at all. The model the Flarum team has adopted isn't unique, and it's one I personally (as a fellow developer) will continue to support. I am also a monthly backer to the Flarum project and spend a lot of my own time helping others Discuss, and also on Discord.

My personal circumstance is of course my own view - others are likely not to share it, or pehaps have their own ideas as to how much they think they should pay in relation to what the developers of such quality software expect. Remember, Flarum has only one "paid" member (I think) - everyone else does this for free because they want to, and firmly believe in the product itself - as I do.

Finally, WordPress has used a similar ecosystem for years - the exception is that Flarum extensions are either free or paid - not "freemium" in the sense that you have to upgrade (there are a few exceptions to this) to gain access to additional features. Another forum product I know (which I shouldn't mention, but will for sake of transparency) is wpForo. The guys charge for IM, Attachment Uploads, Polls, and several others - when all of these are 100% free (and better in my view) than the previous establishment I mentioned.

I totally understand that everyone likes to get something for free, but without either backing or charging for superbly written extensions, this initiative simply cannot be sustained for much longer before people start to lose interest and ultimately walk away. I'm not saying people do this solely for the money - I don't - but there are thousands of open sourced products that have come before Flarum that have simply "died" because of a lack of both funding, and willingness of the developers to continue without any form of income.

JasperVriends

Good discussion, I personally have mixed feelings about this, depending a bit on the size of the extension. But for a healthy ecosystem, I think there should be room for premium extensions in any size. Even the ones that might be 'simple' looking or 'should' be in the core. There might be anyone inspired and make a similar extension for free, that isn't forbidden.

A comparison with WordPress is difficult here, there's a huge community behind that platform and more then 60% of the web that uses a frameworks, uses WordPress.

Companies & contributing
With the current state of Flarum, I think it's time to make Flarum more attractive to companies. When they start using this platform, they'll probably find the 'easy to extend' part of it. This will probably result into even more extensions that weren't available before.

But before those companies will join Flarum, the extensions they need should be available for them. Unlike Discourse and Vanilla forums, Flarum doesn't build extensions that are needed for bigger platforms for companies (for example a knowledge base and support ticket system) while those platforms (at least for Vanilla forums) do have those features available, okay, you pay for that, a lot...

Giving companies an alternative to switch to Flarum instead (with both free and premium extensions available) gives Flarum the possibility to grow. This will also mean a bigger contribution to Flarum in extensions or maybe even to the core by these new companies making this platform even better and stable.

Building premium extensions does mean building some quality and making Flarum accessible for companies who are in doubt if Flarum is good enough to use for professionals in production. It's always good to see some 'professional development' by other companies or individuals, building software together with open source platforms, making it even more interesting to use that platform.

For example, our Support Platform extension is mostly build for companies that are using a Flarum forum for giving support for their product or service. They earn money and build trust for their customers, we've made the decission to make this a paid extension to make sure we can maintain this extension. They're now able to build their community with Flarum and keep everything on the same place instead of working with different systems and platforms. There aren't a lot of platforms available that actually make this possible and have an advanced community platform bundled.

It's always a good thing to draw a line between extensions for small (budget) community forums and the bigger ones. There will be always someone who will be dissapointed that they have to pay for a extension, but on the other hand, it (hopefully) gives them a stable extension that will be developed for sure.

Also, I don't expect that you need all the premium extensions for a good forum, they're nice, but you should only subscribe to them if you're actually going to use them.

Wadera Premium prices should be reserved to plugins which really help to run huge forums and make money with proper support - example - SEO

Yay! I'm glad that the SEO extension is free, otherwise someone probably made it paid 😂

Unfortunately though, I must admit I'm a bit disappointment that I don't see a lot of contribution to the SEO extension for example, it's a very valuable extension and it has been installed over 9.000 times. A lot of effort and time went into it.

However, there are only three pull requests actually improving the extension that wasn't from my company, while it's such an essential extension for Flarum. I'm also pretty sure the extension isn't perfect and can be improved a lot. But aparently people like to use free extensions without helping (or thinking how) to improve them.

TL;DR: In short
What I meant to say with this, is that there are more valuable free extensions then paid extensions. The paid extensions will be very specific build for a specific goal, which will only needed for specific people, communities or companies.

I don't think there will be ever a situation (or reason) that you need (some) premium extensions for a successful free forum and I don't expect that to happen any time soon.

Wadera

Completely agree! Don't take me wrong - I really wish that they make money for their work, as currently - the most popular extensions have 13 subscriber which make ~$650 per year only! This is a week salary for dev in any corporation... Other ones looks even worse - 1-4 subscribers? That's nothing. I think it's just wrong approach here. They spend a lot of time to get it developed and now - they don't have paid for that 🙁

There is millions of dollars earn on stupid small games on iOS / Android market, as they cost "just $1". It's a scale making money. Not price itself.

I've got few premium extensions and I'm supporting FoF as well, but... few people can't change world. We need to do it together!

This is just my observations and I really want to help this project grow! Let's think about how we can help 😉 Few of my ideas:

Centralised market / repo
Price? Maybe lower or one time payment? If we don't change something - sooner it will be easier to paid for discourse premium instead of playing with ordering VPS, installation, looking for extensions on multiple websites, hire admin and pay a ton of money for multiple extensions.
As just setup flarum for non-technical user can be difficult - maybe devs should focus on charging mostly for support / help with installation / hosting (SaaS)?

clarkwinkelmann

Wadera Other ones looks even worse - 1-4 subscribers

Keep in mind most of those extensions have only been published in the last few weeks 😉 Let's give some time for the potential clients to learn about the existence of the extensions and for their business to get out of lockdown.

Kyrne

Wadera as a premium extension dev, I'd like to give some insight into my personal reasons for releasing 2 extensions as paid, both have their own reasons.

ReCache: this extension took an insane amount of time, debugging, and patience. It's arguably the most complicated low-level Flarum extension to date. When you are paying for this extension, you are paying for the amount of hours this took to make and hours it will take to keep compatible with Flarum.

Websocket: This extension can be very hard to setup as there are many small nuances that can cause it to break. I pride myself on providing incredible support (which anyone who's bought my extensions can attest to, like @[deleted]) this is what you're paying for. In addition, it replaced a paid service which out of the gate is 2x more expensive than the extension itself.

Again these are my personal reasons for making these 2 extensions premium. They are not in any way a main source of income for me.

I totally understand why it may seem that by making them premium, features are being taken away from small forums. However, I believe both of my extensions are not necessities for these forums, they will get their best use on medium to large Flarum installs.

[deleted]

Kyrne which anyone who's bought my extensions can attest to, like @phenomlab

I can personally attest to this. The support from @Kyrne is top notch.

Wadera

At start - thank you for creating them! I've already pay for Websocket - It's great one - especially on one pay offer. It's great replacement for Pusher and I'm really grateful for being able to use it. Totally understand how difficult it can be to make it work on different environment. That's why I've pointed before - maybe it will be worth to split it for "Just install" cheap version and separate pricing table for support?

Completely agree as well about ReCache price - as you won't need it until you have huge community to support.

I'm just afraid that current price model won't work and you just give up with creating them. I'm just pointing here that from customer point of view - current extension model is quite messy and expensive if you summarise multiple extensions prices - especially if you want create small forum.

And @Kyrne please - I don't expect that great developers like you or any other will explain themselves here. I'm sure that all of you have your own reason and we - users aren't person who can judge by anything else than our wallets 😉

Once again - Thank you for creating them and instead of focusing on questioning which extensions are priced correctly and which one not - let's think what we can do improve whole system. It can be difficult and probably - core developers should work and discuss it together.

datitisev

While we read these great posts by developers & users alike, I'd like to remind everyone that premium extensions through a marketplace are currently only offered by Extiverse. Extiverse is not run or handled by the Flarum foundation, and though it is the only existing marketplace right now, it is still just a community service.

Even though many extension developers of free & paid extensions, specially in Friends of Flarum, are part of the Flarum team, any extension/service that is published/run by them outside of the flarum/ namespace are community extensions, like any other developer's.

Feel free to continue discussing the topic here, I just wanted to make sure it was clear who/how these extensions & services are provided by.

luceos

I always enjoy people who write constructive criticism on the status quo.

Most of the people behind these premium extensions also ship and maintain a large set of open source extensions. At some point it no longer makes sense to ship everything as open source, due to the large amount of maintenance coming from them. Each time Flarum releases a new version, these extensions need to be patched too.

An extension is usually created for personal reasons, either they are commissioned, you need it yourself or you think it's fun or educating; but maintaining them is another story entirely. Without that motivation extensions get harder to maintain. I've been there and many extensions developers reach that phase. So they turn to donations, patreon or paypal, but that doesn't really work. People aren't easily convinced to pay for something that is shared for free anyhow. That's why premium extensions came into existence. To keep these people in the game of extension development and probably motivate them to continue maintaining their other extensions as well.

prices add up so quickly

Yes, this is something I've noticed too. The reason for this is twofold. First off, extiverse plans are mostly inspired by the plans premium extensions had on flagrow.io. Flagrow.io had a minimum of $ 5 monthly and only allowed for monthly plans. Extiverse has given premium extension developers much more freedom, for instance by allowing multiple plans, single payment and recurring ones. Secondly, extiverse previously used private packagist which bills 1 euro per extension subscribed to per user. This might have inspired the premium extension developers to stick to the $ 5 minimum and steer away from single payments. Last week, this third party integration was removed; hence that lower plans have been popping up.

Having said that, I still agree that subscription costs might add up quickly. That's also a reason why a planned feature for extiverse is to add bundles, at least per extension developer team (eg kilowhat or kyrne) if these teams/developers wish to add that. Bundles would require a subscription, but would include all extensions of the team, including new ones. This feature is still in conceptualisation and cannot be expected soon, other priorities precede it.

Friends of Flarum

I agree. Friends of Flarum could use additional backers, but so does Flarum itself. To be honest, Friends of Flarum mostly has one very active maintainer supported by a wide range of past maintainers or extension developers that help guarantee a minimum level of quality. @IanM currently is the driving force behind the Friends, next to our all star @datitisev. In the background you will see many people who are also active staff members in Flarum itself. Our hopes, as FoF, is that more people will feel passionate about Flarum and these extensions so that we will gain more active maintainers. That we need to pull the cart on extension maintenance is quite the burden to carry with our responsibilities to Flarum and real life activities. But we are passionate and driven to make it happen anyhow.

Get scale by lowering prices ... get 600 subscribers with price like $2 per year than 5 subscribers with $5 per month

This is where I disagree. You can only get scale if there is a market to get that traction from. The current audience isn't as large as you'd hope for. Maybe the prices are a bit steep for some of the smaller extensions, but the larger extensions really are quite cheap. Eventually the premium extensions developers will find the best market fit, but until then I have no issue with them experimenting, including doing regular deals.

Maybe single, centralised extension marketplace will be helpful?

Just to explain. There currently is only one marketplace. Extiverse.com supersedes Flagrow.io (and Bazaar). Extiverse is the sole provider of premium extensions for the Flarum ecosystem. They won't interfere with each other.

You then mention "FoF, Flagrow or Extiverse".

Flagrow used to be an extension developer team set up by @santiagobiali and me. At some point @clarkwinkelmann joined us in this venture. At some point I hoped to professionalise and commercialise by setting up Gravure. Gravure, a cooperation with Clark and some others, built an early version of Flagrow.io and began work on a Flarum hosting service that was never finished. Fast forward, flagrow as an extension developer team dissolved and moved their extensions into the Friends team. The Friends of Flarum team was a merger between Flagrow and ReFlar by the way.

That leaves Extiverse. Extiverse is the successor of flagrow.io, rebuild from the ground up. Its goal is to support the Flarum ecosystem by providing free and commercial tooling for your Flarum forum. Extension discovery and premium extension marketplace are probably well known. But there a few other features in the pipeline that will be much loved. To replace Bazaar you will be able to selectively assemble a list of extensions to be installed on your forum through FTP or SSH. Composer will no longer be required. But before that feature is available, a scalable hosted Flarum service will be released. A service that allows you to assemble a list of extensions, including premium ones, to be used on your cloud hosted Flarum forum.

Let's say model when you pay for extension inside freeflarum

The benefit that FreeFlarum has is that it scales well. It uses one codebase, one Flarum installation, to serve all forums. The drawback of this approach is that all extensions that are installed can be enabled by each forum. That's also a reason why extensions are selectively added to FF, extensions like recache would be a guaranteed failure, the same applies for fof/upload that would use the local filesystem for uploads. Adding functionality to allow a per-forum premium subscription inside FreeFlarum requires effort, time; something that a free service might not be willing to invest. Having your own forum on shared hosting or a vm or even the hosted flarum solution planned in Extiverse separates every forum, so it does not have the same issue.

Confusion of having so many different parties, offering paid support etc

I have a vision of what Flarum can potentially look like in terms of its organisation and ecosystem. My intentions of where Extiverse is positioned in this vision has been made clear to the team not too long ago. I hope you agree with me that Flarum is exciting and its future is bright. The project is young and these commercial projects as well, let's see how we can best shape our future!

Wadera

Thank you so much for this post. That clarify a lot!