@Christoph-Hart cool! I've scheduled some time with our JUCE freelancer to make it JUCE6 compatible, using the APIs available there for machine IDs. We'll also implement an option to pass your own function for fingerprinting, so it's easy to plug in whatever else you may create, if you don't patch JUCE itself. Is there anything else we can do in the same go to make it more HISE-friendly? Let me know!

@dannytaurus heard!

We're working hard on removing the small fees we have, we just made the decision early on that we'd rather be realistic and transparent about what we have costs on, and forward those, instead of blending everything.
We may consider mashing more features into a single fee, but we also get really nice feedback on the fact that we are fully usage-based, and al-la-carte, so that's difficult to balance.
Some upcoming changes to our business structure and better volume deals should make our pricing way more attractive come new years.

In our experience, Meta ads are like the second most important ad spend, after Instagram, quite good conversion usually.
But you need to get the Meta Pixel to track everything, otherwise the targeting won't learn/improve. Depending on your shop setup, this can be quite easy or quite hard.
I haven't talked to anyone who didn't run conversion campaigns, as that's usually the end goal when you are mature enough to dump enough money on Meta ads for it to matter. As always though, there's never a silver-bullet answer when it comes to ads, everyone's experience is very different, depending on audience match, content quality, and so much more.

Good idea, thanks!

Our JUCE module contains most of the stuff you need to handle licensing & delivery:

• License activations (more on this later)
• Time-limited trials
• Offline activations
• Subscription-ready (including our Rent-to-Own features)
• Update notifications on new releases
• Analytics back to Moonbase (optional, stuff like host/daw/etc meta)

Our licensing flow is a bit different than most, we want the smoothest process we can, and so what it does is just open a browser on your website, where our web SDKs take over the process and activate plugins on the website. Since customers are usually already logged in to your website, since they made a purchase, downloaded your plugin, or whatever else, we can immediately activate the plugin.
We have a video of this flow, including the default UI of the JUCE module in our BSA customer story: https://moonbase.sh/stories/blacksaltaudio/

Having customer authentication on your website is a really good way to also provide a fully personalized storefront experience, where we can showcase segmented pricing, enabling loyalty discounts and a bunch of other cool things.

The biggest hurdle to adopting our JUCE module in HISE projects is the fact that it depends on JUCE version 7. I'm not the original author, but I know there's probably two things that would need to change for a downgrade to JUCE version 5 (which I think HISE is still using?):

1. The device fingerprinting needs to change. We had issues with the older JUCE (< v7) fingerprinting in cases where we crossed ~100k devices, where we saw collisions and unstable fingerprints.
2. I believe we're also using some utilities from the newer URL/HTTP classes, but I'm not 100% certain of this.

Generally, it's not a super complex module, but it is very battle-tested, powering hundreds of thousands of plugin installs.

@d-healey said in SoundSync: Reseller, Security & Serial Management Platform:

@trillbilly said in SoundSync: Reseller, Security & Serial Management Platform:

Im working towards a complete audio plugin/product backbone that allows developers (new and old) to quickly and reliably manage the entire backend of the business (and some development tools).

Sounds similar to Moonbase

Thanks for the shout-out! I'm Tobias, the founder of Moonbase.
Won't hijack this thread, welcome any competition in this space - it needs more modern options!

I believe we have 3-4 HISE users already onboarding onto Moonbase, integrating the JUCE module, but I'm not sure about the current status. It will need some changes here and there, but nothing too major I hope. I tried reaching out to @Christoph-Hart a while ago after we met in Berlin, but didn't hear back. Maybe it's time to re-visit a collab here? :)

Interfacing with resellers better sounds like a really cool approach, and something we have on the roadmap too. It gets tricky fast to get a grasp on actual cashflow and revenue sources when you have sales scattered across several channels, including your own. Happy to share any experience we have doing software sales @trillbilly !

Appreciate you taking the time to share your calculations!
There's certainly a difference in price, but also a massive difference in features and mindset behind the platforms, so I hope you all also consider everything else you need when selecting each, vs what is included in these prices.

In case it's interesting, I just published our email campaigns pricing: https://moonbase.sh/pricing/
Again, fully usage-based, with the idea to be cheaper for the common case compared to competitors.
For a typical plugin dev with an audience of 10k newsletter subscribers, with 2-3 campaigns a month, we're coming in at 34-48$/per month compared to 29-39$ for Brevo, 89$ for Mailerlite, 110$ for Mailchimp, 150$ for Klaviyo.
And by charging per email, if you send less often, then it's way cheaper.

With automations coming next, I hope using our solution (if already using Moonbase) is a no-brainer.

@dannytaurus Thanks for sharing this! If anyone has questions about the data going into this, or suggestions for the next survey, please let us know! :)

@dannytaurus the only thing I'd add is that the 3% conversion fee is carried by the buyer by default, so you don't technically pay that.
This is the alternative to listing in EUR for example, where the buyer would still pay the conversion fee, just through their card provider instead.
The end result should be that you get the same net amount in either case.
If you hard-code a GBP price, you should include the conversion rates in that price to get the same effect.

I totally get this is not great if you expect GBP in your account at the end of the day, so I hope we can add support for more holding currencies by the end of the year.

@David-Healey says it well; you might have a working checkout with WooCommerce or Paddle or FastSpring or whatever, but it's the "other stuff" we specialize in. Eliminating the glue code of connecting purchase history with your newsletter subscribers, offering upgrade pricing and exclusive discounts, so many things you need to scale your sales.

And according to our merchants who move to us from Gumroad, we've been more stable than Gumroad has, but better check with our merchants to verify that fact. Happy to give anyone a demo with no strings attached, just book a slot: https://cal.com/moonbase/introduction

Anyways, sorry for hijacking the thread, this is about meta ads, not us, here's how we track conversions through our embedded storefront: https://moonbase.sh/articles/adding-meta-pixel-support-to-the-embedded-storefront/

@d-healey said in Moonbase:

@tobbentm Is it compatible with GPL plugins?

Since our JUCE module is closed-source, no.
You'd have to dual-license it, with a separate version that has DRM in it.
Alternatively, you could integrate on your own, or use other libraries to integrate with.
Syl is currently working on a pure C++ (no JUCE dep) open-source thing here, but it's very early days: https://github.com/SLM-Audio/moonbasepp
We're getting more and more requests for a simple C++ library, so we may try to build an alternate open-source solution ourselves next year.