Is there a business model for plugin development
Is there a viable business model for developing community plugins? Particularly, libraries used in mobile apps like react native. I know Wordpress has a market for premium plugins but I’m wondering how this would work for a mobile library. The libraries are generally open source on github.
One of the oldest interviews I did was with Nishant Agrawal who created FormCraft. He was able to find a lot of distribution in a marketplace called CodeCanyon, which I'd previously never heard of. Of course, it helps that it's a WordPress plugin, and WordPress has a market for this stuff as you pointed out.
Another person I talked to was Dave DeSandro of Metafizzy. He makes plugins for web apps and sells them directly from his own site. Okay, it's not mobile, no. But he's also not relying on a popular marketplace or distribution channel.
Instead he's building high quality plugins that are very unique in their functionality and allow for flashy interactions that really stand out. That uniqueness helps him get more press than generic plugins would get, and also prevents him from having to duke it out with a slew of competitors.
For example, his animating grid plugin Isotope is the only one of its kind that I'm aware of. When I decided to make a grid layout for the Indie Hackers interviews last year, I knew I wanted that effect because I'd seen it somewhere and remembered it. One Google search later and I ended up at Metafizzy, paying Dave $25 for a license.
I know https://pspdfkit.com, they are selling a PDF sdk (plugin) for a long time now. Similar model but different field https://www.photoeditorsdk.com and https://developers.aviary.com.
They both tackle something that is hard to do or time consuming for developers. There is always the risk that someone release an open source library doing the same. However support will be a key differentiation compared to open source. I would say some customer will be ready to pay if you provide fast support with regular updates.
Licensing