Buying Marketplace Items versus Building Your Own
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I am wondering how many Concrete users out there develop their own themes and add-ons for their various projects, or how many purchase items from the Marketplace?
Although it may seem much easier and economical to just build your own theme, doesn't seem easier to just buy one, to save time?
I am posting this out of concern from other posts I've seen that some Concrete users want everything free, so they end up building their own stuff.
However, I am against that because, firstly, it takes the core C5 team lots of time to develop and deliver an amazing product! They need support. And this is done the by selling of themes and add-ons developed by others. Of course, you may still develop something if it doesn't exist in the marketplace.
Building your own stuff all the time can take far too long, and ultimately cost your clients more money (and headaches)! Believe me, from my experience it's easier to just buy the stuff you need. Then, should your client (or your own project) require a custom function or design of some kind, you'll have already saved a lot of time, and have a great base to develop off of.
I would like to urge people to consider purchasing their themes and add-ons for the following OBVIOUS reasons:
- Saves you a lot of time!
- You get support unlike that of anywhere else
- Helps financially support the development of Concrete!
What do you think? What are your thoughts?
Although it may seem much easier and economical to just build your own theme, doesn't seem easier to just buy one, to save time?
I am posting this out of concern from other posts I've seen that some Concrete users want everything free, so they end up building their own stuff.
However, I am against that because, firstly, it takes the core C5 team lots of time to develop and deliver an amazing product! They need support. And this is done the by selling of themes and add-ons developed by others. Of course, you may still develop something if it doesn't exist in the marketplace.
Building your own stuff all the time can take far too long, and ultimately cost your clients more money (and headaches)! Believe me, from my experience it's easier to just buy the stuff you need. Then, should your client (or your own project) require a custom function or design of some kind, you'll have already saved a lot of time, and have a great base to develop off of.
I would like to urge people to consider purchasing their themes and add-ons for the following OBVIOUS reasons:
- Saves you a lot of time!
- You get support unlike that of anywhere else
- Helps financially support the development of Concrete!
What do you think? What are your thoughts?
I don't think there's ever going to be a complete agreement on this subject matter. lol
C5 has a good business model. One that is sustainable long term.
I take tremendous pride knowing that every addon I sell helps to advance the CMS. And I take supporting those paid addons very seriously as well.
ChadStrat
C5 has a good business model. One that is sustainable long term.
I take tremendous pride knowing that every addon I sell helps to advance the CMS. And I take supporting those paid addons very seriously as well.
ChadStrat
I like buying stuff from the marketplace. As long as there is something that matches what I need it saves me time. I have purchased some marketplace items knowing I will modify them significantly before they do what I want on the basis that it is easier than starting from scratch. Even when I buy a theme and it ends up looking nothing like the original it saves me time.
The main decision I make against buying is if I think I would need to both make extensive modifications and that my custom development could become a marketplace item in the future. In such cases I don't risk any potential for copyright infringement and start from scratch.
I keep a pot of my income from my own marketplace items in my C5 account just for buying more addons. It saves a lot on exchange rates.
On the other hand, there are marketplace blocks that I have bought and pushed to one side because once I get to use them in anger they just don't fit the requirement. Requirements are my lookout, so I keep the items because they could be useful for something else.
There have are also been a couple of marketplace items I bought that just didn't work. They may have done once, but the world and C5 had moved on and that was it. In both cases the developers did a refund as soon as I reported the bug (I never asked for a refund, they didn't have time to sort out the bug).
I have not run into mkly's problem yet. For a small addon I would probably just hack it enough for the upgrade. For a large addon, maybe it could block an upgrade.
Overall, I think the info provided to prospective buyers could be more informative, especially about the reputation and presence of the seller (there was a thread about that a few weeks ago). Better information would lead to more confidence that a potential purchase would be the right purchase. Good for the buyer and good for the seller.
The main decision I make against buying is if I think I would need to both make extensive modifications and that my custom development could become a marketplace item in the future. In such cases I don't risk any potential for copyright infringement and start from scratch.
I keep a pot of my income from my own marketplace items in my C5 account just for buying more addons. It saves a lot on exchange rates.
On the other hand, there are marketplace blocks that I have bought and pushed to one side because once I get to use them in anger they just don't fit the requirement. Requirements are my lookout, so I keep the items because they could be useful for something else.
There have are also been a couple of marketplace items I bought that just didn't work. They may have done once, but the world and C5 had moved on and that was it. In both cases the developers did a refund as soon as I reported the bug (I never asked for a refund, they didn't have time to sort out the bug).
I have not run into mkly's problem yet. For a small addon I would probably just hack it enough for the upgrade. For a large addon, maybe it could block an upgrade.
Overall, I think the info provided to prospective buyers could be more informative, especially about the reputation and presence of the seller (there was a thread about that a few weeks ago). Better information would lead to more confidence that a potential purchase would be the right purchase. Good for the buyer and good for the seller.
Personally, FOSS keeps you from getting stuck with a dead project when the original author stops support/dies/gets marred etc. But speculation is the root of all evil so here is an example.
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/get-directions/...
I have someone I'm working with that has like 20 of these installed on a bunch of sites but is stuck waiting to upgrade to 5.5 because of it. I've tried to contact the developer. So has a few others.
This thing is trivial to write. Although I can go in and change it in ten minutes and then update the sites, now I'm the only one supporting this. If it were MIT/GPL etc, I could fork and update it and publish my changes. Then everyone else in the same boat would start using mine(and patching back). But now we're stuck in this situation where we have like this private code base that we will have to babysit forever.
I chose this one on purpose because it's free as in beer. It's not the money but the future lock in that scares me.