Pay what you want

Maybe a pay what you want system could be help to increase the number of app developers. A part of the money earned with this system could be used for further development of the platform. elementary OS has successfully introduced such a system https://github.com/elementary/appcenter. Since they introduced pay what you want to its app center a bunch of really good new apps were released for elementary OS.

[bhdouglass]

Thanks for the suggestion! I've been following the elementary appcenter's development and we've written down some ideas for how we want to approach this.

Nice to hear. I'll keep an eye on it.

[krille-chan]

A very very simple solution could be:

If the app has a donation option, then just change the "Install" button to a "Buy" button and by pressing the button, redirect the user to the donate page of the app and install the app simultanly.
Because of pay-what-you-want, there is no need to check, if the user really has spend money.

Improvements could be:

• The app author can define a "price", so on the button can be the text: "Buy (2$)"
• On the button should be a dropdownmenu, where the user can choose the option "Install for free"
• Over the button should be a label with the text: "Pay what you want", so the user knows, that this "price" is not forced

With this solution there is no need to implement an own pay-system. The authors can just link the users to their PayPal-account, Liberapay, Patreon, Bitcoin or what they prefer.

This solution could also be a placeholder for a better pay-what-you-want-solution in the future.

[bhdouglass]

Thanks for the idea, we'll keep it in mind when this issue gets worked on!