I would love to be able to develop a little app, and then sell it to Tidbyt users in a kind of app store. That would be amazing and it would keep a continuing revenue stream for Tidbyt.
What do you think?
Hey @fargonaut! Having the ability to publish and share apps with other users is very high on our roadmap. We haven’t discussed having those apps be paid, though it’s something we could consider.
There’s a lot of financial and legal complications around setting up a paid store, so we’d have to figure those out. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do it, but it’s going to take a lot of thing.
A simpler model that we’ll definitely support is if you build a paid service — things like Slack, Spotify, etc. — and then have a Tidbyt app that’s offered as a feature to your subscribers.
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I’d rather Tidbyt charge a nominal fee from each user for using the Tidbyt cloud rather than community apps becoming closed source. I guess it would be nice if TidByt developers could earn some money on their apps, but as it stands today I don’t think the install base is big enough for that to amount to much anyway.
There is pretty great value in the open source nature of the app community. It is a great learning resource and good way to see how people get creative with Pixlet. Also it allows you to contribute new features or fixes to existing apps.
I think @rohan is right in that a simple model to charge for apps now is for people to host paid services and then provide a Tidbyt community app requiring a valid license or subscription.
I like this idea. Probably wouldn’t be used much just yet but this would help bolster the apps and software a bit. There’s only so much a developer is going to do for free. Also, in some apps, for example, some non-technical folks don’t even know what an API key is but they certainly know how to type in their credit card information.