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Introducing Binpress — a marketplace for open-source projects

Hi all,

I’m Eran, one of the founders of Binpress (www.binpress.com), a marketplace for open-source projects. I had an article featured here recently (about donations and open-source), and I’ve been meaning to introduce myself and Binpress to the community here, get some feedback and hopefully get some of you onboard.

At Binpress we provide a platform for developers to monetize their open-source projects and build a professional business around it.
Adding a commercial layer around open-source is not new — MySQL, Red hat and others have been doing it very successfully for years. What we’re doing is providing the tools and process for individual developers and small companies that do not have the expertise or capacity to build a successful open-source business by delegating the non technical aspects to us.

We handle marketing, advertising, sales, distribution and provide network effects (by being a central hub with repeat customers) to bring the audience to quality commercial open-source projects. We handle licensing and pricing, help with copywriting and design, take care of payment processing and payouts, and provide our brand to add trust and as a support buffer between you and the customers.

At the other hand, we’re trying to increase adoption of open-source in SMBs and enterprise, by providing quality assurance (via a code review for each component) and guaranteed support. Many businesses avoid open-source due to licensing and support issues, and we believe it’s a huge waste to rewrite existing (and already mature) code.

Our audience is not just existing open-source projects, but also developers who have mature code from previous projects and did not have the motivation to properly clean it up and package it for release. We want to create new open-source for the benefit of the software development ecosystem.

Our business model is taking 30% commission on license purchases and 10% on customization / integration services (not yet on the platform — coming soon!). We believe it’s a fair take for digital products which have no associated production costs per item, and is customary on other digital distribution marketplaces (such as the Appstore).

We already have publishers making very respectable annual salaries just from publishing on Binpress — some over $100k annually. Not everyone gets to that level, naturally, but we found that if you offer significant solutions that solve common or “hard” problems and price the licenses accordingly, you will likely have good success with it. Also, we just started growing, so there is a lot of untapped market out there. We recently joined the 500startups accelerator program, and have started raising a large seed round to accelerate our growth.

I would love to hear some feedback from the community here and answer any questions you might have.

Cheers!
-Eran

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It look very interesting, but i properly don’t understand how project holders exactly make money. Can i ask you to provide some examples, success stories? Especially interesting would be to hear of successful individual developers.

Projects make money by offering permessive commercial licenses in addition or instead of open-source ones. This is very relevant to businesses who often have reservations about open-source licenses (especially GPL) and are willing to pay for commercial licensing. In addition, project owners can provide predefined services — for example, publish an app based on a project to the appstore — that are very simple for the project developers but would be much more time consuming for the clients.

For example, one of our most popular projects is a PDF SDK for iOS — www.binpress.com/...sdk-for-ios/859 — which generates around $10k monthly for his developer. This developer has a set of useful components for iOS development and is doing very well on Binpress (he is from Turkey, by the way).

Wow! If i’ll ever start my own open source project, i’ll know where i can monetize it. Thanks to your team.

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Hi Eran,
Doubt, that UA developers are the perfectly targeted audience for Binpress. Most tend to manage everything themselves before raising a round. They are too hungry to outsource anything. =)

And afterwards they just hire some marketing staff they think would handle the job.

Hi Dmytro,

I didn’t understand exactly what you meant about raising a round, but I was hoping to reach out to the community to find people who’ll be interested in publishing on Binpress, not buying products published on our marketplace (though that would be nice too :)). I was hoping to start a discussion about selling code products as a viable business route.

Hope that makes sense

I didn’t understand exactly what you meant about raising a round,
this:
raising a large seed round

GL, anyways!

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Looks like there’s 0 interest in Ukraine to Binpress :) How many developers from Ukraine do you have on in your system so far?

Well, there is 0 interest from this community apparently... we have several dozen Ukrainian publishers on binpress.

which is a shame. do you have a success story, pref. from a guy in Ukraine/Russia? Somehow stories are much easier to relate to than marketing pitches. ;-)

the DOU community was initially more about companies & salary discussions in UA but it’s shifting to business step by step.

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