"AppStore" proposal:
One of Mozdev's goals in the last 12 months has been to find new revenue streams. The AppStore is an attempt at obtaining a new stream.
The idea is to build a system that makes it dead simple for addon authors to charge fees for their addons, like the shareware model that was popular with Windows software in the '90s.
To elaborate, the idea is this:
Mozdev provides a new service. This service allows addon authors to sell licenses for their addon. The licenses can be:
- One-time purchases. Each addon author decides how much to charge for his addon.
- subscription-based licenses (e.g. $9.99 per year or, say, $7.99 if you buy two years up-front) which entitles the user to free addon updates for the duration of the subscription
Mozdev makes money in one of two ways:
- Collecting a percentage of each sale or
- Collecting a flat monthly fee per from the addon author. This is the model http://www.e-junkie.com uses.
What mozdev provides:
- Code that is included in the author's addon. This code:
- Prompts the user for his license key and email address
- Validates the license/email combination against the mozdev servers that the key and associated email address are valid
- A nag screen for invalid licenses
- Server-side code for:
- Collecting payments from PayPal
- Emailing licenses with generated download links to users
- Capability to revoke licenses
- Capability to extend license expiration dates
- Capability to upload new addon versions to the system
- Auto-generation of update.rdf for valid update requests (update requests from Firefox/Seamonkey/Thunderbird/Songbird/etc include the user's license key / email combo)
- TODO: reporting (e.g., number of sales, active licenses, inactive licenses, etc.), coupon codes, etc. These things could be done in a future release.