selling boilerplate code? 🤔
What do you think of having dedicated online stores for selling some lightweight boilerplate code for which it would took you a couple of days to write it. The logic is if you need X amount of hours to write some general piece of code which could then be modified for your specific purpose, why wouldn't you then buy that code for some amount of $ and save your self time and money. Also, once you buy it, you can use it without any restrictions for how long you want it.
Maybe I'm a bit too cynical for my own good, but it'd take a lot of convincing to make me trust that a boilerplate/template/etc. I pay for is actually going to be useful, and not spaghetti code that I either can't realistically do anything with, or could rewrite faster by myself than spending time trying to understand it.
Hell, I wouldn't even use something like https://spark.laravel.com/ unless I really had to, and that's built by the author of the framework it's for (so just about the best possible endorsement a product like this could have).
Hm, this is obviously a good boilerplate. When it comes to my own product, I totally get you. But why are you so suspicious when it's not about your own product? Aren't we using other people's code all the time (npm packages for example). I was assuming that some people would find it useful if they could save themselves some amount of hours. My target group would be developers who are regularly building MVPs to test their startup ideas or some freelancers who are doing some projects for clients (this way they could use those spare hours to do some other paid projects and earn even more money 🤷♂️).
I'm just trying to understand the logic here. And one thing that I can't understand is that people are regularly buying premium Wordpress themes for $400 while they could code it up all by themselves for one afternoon. And on the other side, developers are skeptical to buy boilerplate code which provides them with features for which it would take them a few weeks to write.
I'm just thinking out loud and my mind is 🤯🤯 .
You correctly noticed that the boilerplate must be very simple to grasp in a short period of time.
The big question here to ask is if it is even worth to create products for fellow developers? 🤔 Maybe, we should concentrate on non-technical people. 🤷♂️
What do you think?
IMO, there are many hundreds of production ready templates that have battle tested... with the OSS culture open and thriving, selling code to developers is not a good business idea - you are competing with similar or better products that are available for free by subject matter experts the majority of the time.
Yeah, that was my concern also. But on the other hand, I thought if there is a market for HTML/Landing page templates, then why wouldn't there be a market for some niche adjusted boilerplate code for apps. 🤷♂️ I already saw that there are some paid boilerplate solutions that are pretty expensive(even $1000+), so my idea was to build something that is between free boilerplate and those paid, and to price them in a range of one or two days of a average coder's salary.
I will definitely further investigate those free solutions and share my findings here.
How many ppl are actually buying HTML landing pages, though?
Also where did you see a $1k boilerplate solution? It is possible it is a market - I'd never pay for a boilerplate, especially when it's mostly just build on top of free MIT projects.
also this one https://bullettrain.co/pricing
this one for example https://usegravity.app/pricing