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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