I know how to publish a plugin through ADD. I made a fastSpring account and linked it, but there doesn’t seem to be a roadmap for how to proceed from there other than the subscription, period, price and trial period setup in the Services/Commerce on adobe.
Are any people going this route? I see some commerical plugins like guideguide offsering subscriptions directly through fastSpring and Doronsupply selling one time license keys.
I have read a few posts about bad customer service. Is there anything preventing file copy piracy if I don’t implement my own license keys?
Update, Adobe has not been able to get my fastSpring account to link for the past 5 days, so I’m looking into implementing my own license key / subscription model with Lemon Squeezy as the payment processor.
I believe they were acquired by stripe, and that might be why they aren’t as good anymore? Stripe is cheaper, but you have to handle international tax on your own. For a low priced monthly subscription the fixed fees do add up…
@Kayrock I have a good deal of experience with Adobe extensions and subscription licensing. At Dataclay we have licensed Templater as a recurring subscription since around 2016 — its a product built with ScriptUI, so before CEP and before UXP.
With licensing, it’s important to really, truly, own as much of the lock-down mechanism as possible, while also having tightly integrated code for communicating with your license provider’s APIs. It needs to be as flexible as possible. Ideally, the license key generator should be separated as much as possible from the payment processor platform for a number of reasons. If you decide that you do not like the payment processor, you are talking about ripping out any licensing code that they provide via their APIs and moving to another provider — that takes time and then earlier versions of your released code won’t work with your new provider. You would need to force users to upgrade. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes things very complex, encumbered, and entangled.
We use FastSpring outside of Adobe’s “split pay” deal they have with them because it reduces the chances for more issues when it comes to payouts. Also, it increases the share of the sale for the developer. Importantly, though, is that they handle tax / VAT collection and remittance which is critical when it comes to selling software which is a global marketplace.
Unfortunately, FastSpring does not give you much in the way of license key generators, and they really expect developers to have their own methods to do so. While I cannot comment publicly on how we do it, feel free to reach out via PM if you want to know more details. In my opinion, the provider we use is the most flexible and economical on the market. They have good documentation and are not very “greedy” per se.