I hope I post in the right forum rather than in the Script forum because I'd like to talk the business point of view. What do you think about selling a script right now, is it a good business to start? in the middle of free and cheap scripts out there, especially in DP which sometimes someone sells a script for 5 - 10 bucks, can this business produce decent money and get paid for the effort? Actually, there are a lot of questions I'd like to ask, but let's start from here...
Define decent money? With the weak dollar at the moment $5 = £2.50. Card fees would be about 50p so for each unit sold you would get £2 A decent developer in the UK earns around £35,000 so it equates to £20 per hour (we will ignore the extras that a uk company has to pay for employees). If you say on average 1 in 10 people need 30 minutes of time in terms of resales enquiries/ post sale problems etc (assuming the developer is 100% occupied and has no lul between enquiries) you are making £1 profit per sale. If you take that £1 profit as income yourself you then have to pay 40% of that as tax (assuming you are a higher rate tax payer which presumably you are if you are employing others that are). So your personal take home pay for each unit sold is 60p Knock off initial development and ongoing upgrades, maintaining sales site etc and round it off at 50p Decent money is what? £50,000? (you obviously want to make more than your developers are making) and for that you are having to sell 100,000 units a year
lol well thats was detailed lol no but if you knock up a web site that sellees scripts cheap and on autopilot then it can be a nice side line but proberly the best way tp wprk it would be to set up a members site where ppl pay say $10 a month you keep adding new scripts each month give them free hosting. if you promot it and get you sell a few affills with in 6 months you will have 100 mebers easyly (if you promot it and offer good scripts) 100 X $10 =$1000 a month even if you say $500 a month cost (it would cost no where nere that ) your site makeing a nice little bit more members more money hope a forim for user to userr support your done. i know what i have posted is a very siplistic viwe but the post abouv mine is a very necitive viwe just wanted to give the thred some contrast
@AstarothSolutions Thanks for your detailed calculation, btw I didn't say that I'm going to sell the script at that cheap price, what I meant is if we're selling at normal price, are people still interested to buy (while there are many free and cheap scripts)? can the business run well? @w3bmaster Yeah, I was thinking it's oversaturated, but hey, what's not saturated in the internet? even if you had a unique script, once you launch it there will be a lot of clones following you, and you know it's almost impossible to find a really unique idea now. Maybe the simple question is, are those people on hotscripts really making money by selling their script? or we better stay out of this business?
There are SO many people doing this these days for next to nothing, especially with some of the talented coders working overseas I think you would have your work cut out for you, not to mention there is not a lot of regulation to make sure what is yours is yours etc.
Even selling your script for cheap can become a bridge for you to make more money. Having a good and popular script under your portfolio can bring you a lot of business.
At last there's someone saying it can make money lol.... is it so unprofitable? I've just visited the content forum and someone there selling a script and many people take the pre-order (yeah, maybe because he sells it at big discount of normal price, but still not a cheap 5-10 bucks). Okay, let's say the price is around $100, if you're in the position that needs that script, are you going to buy it or still looking for cheaper or free ones? @mesum I'm talking about the business of selling a script itself, profitable or not, yes I know that it can be a way to next business like someone could be interested to hire you etc, but now, I'd like to see whether selling a script itself can work or not.
It depends on the script. VBullitin and Community Server both attract large amounts of users even with their signficant costs and there are plenty of free scripts for forums. A lot also depends on what you consider reasonable sums of money are. Whilst it may come across as arrogant it is more a simple fact of life that what others said about $500 being able to tide you over simply isnt true in the UK/ for us. $500 after tax is going to be under £150 so if it is taking more than 3 hours of my life a month my time is better spent on other things.
Okay, if we put the money aside, what is the most important thing to get success in selling the script, is it the price, the quality, promotion, or else?
I think all of them are important. Maybe you should consider creating open source software, look how some people operate. They create quality open source or freeware script (they do not need promotion and price btw). If your script is really good then people will start linking to you. Soon your pagerank will increase to about 5 or 6, many open source projects has got such PR so it should be a lot easier to get then for web directory. When you reach high PR start selling links, this is also what succesful open source projects owners do. If you do not belive me checkout with yahoo where some of aviva directory (and other big directories) links come from.
well my company in Cambodia could work on any script development for as low as 8$/hour all i need is the idea of what software to write that can sell on the internet.