Question - General Is this a good or a bad idea for a paid service?

S

Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Hey guys,

All my assets i want to make free. But I was wondering if I charged as a paid service to provide developers support for when they need help or have bugs to report that could be a means for me to make some money from my work, being paid by the hour for providing support, similar to what RedHat does with their Linux distro afaict.

My only concern is people would see me telling them this costs money for me to provide support just in case they missed that fact, and they get upset and give a bad rating. I still intend to be proactive at fixing bugs I find myself, but another issue is they may not want to pay and they go ahead and tell me an existing bug I didn't know about anyway without me being paid to fix it for them.

Has anyone else tried this approach before? Are my concerns accurate? Should I scrap this idea?

Thanks,
Samuel
 

Joe Ellis

Member
I'm not sure really, but I think if you provide specific help based on the people's projects how to integrate your extensions into them, I think that'd definitely be something people are willing to pay for. Cus it's one thing reading a manual or a tutorial, but integrating an extension into a specific project and using it's functions in the middle of the rest of the code, is another thing. And depending on peoples' skill levels, you could end up teaching them a great deal if they need to learn other things in order to integrate it properly..
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
I see nothing wrong with your idea. The issue I see is more about the basics of how you will never satisfy everybody, and there will always be someone who complains. You could provide free assets AND support and I bet you would still run across someone who would find a way to complain about something. Though the business plan is sound and does work for some people, just be prepared for the worst because that's how it goes.

Another caveat you might have to think about, is with customers who already paid. You may want to figure out a way to satisfy them once assets go free. You may be able to offer some unit of free support(like an hour or two, dependent on your value, etc...).
 
It's perfectly fine to expect remuneration for your services. It's a bonus for a developer who's using an extension for a critical feature to know (reliable) support is available, and would certainly contribute to the decision to choose that extension. Be aware that the fixes can't come like normal open-source fixes... which is 'when you get to them'. :))
 
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