Selling software to other developers?
Are there any IndieHackers selling software libraries to other developers? e.g. selling an NPM library to other front end devs? Selling react components, wordpress themes etc?
I'm curious how you're handling licenses & upgrades for this when the code is not running on your server. How do you ensure people are paying you for your code and not accidentally (or deliberately) violating your license?
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I run Keygen and have a few customers who sell packages for Node, Java and PHP. It shouldn't be too hard to get something simple up and running on your own, if that's what you want to do. Is there anything unique/specific you're wanting to do, or do you just want to "gate" your package with a license keys? Handling installs in Node is as easy as pointing them to a file URL and having them add it to their
package.json.For example, you could support adding your package like so:
Automatic updates are a little harder with Node packages, unless you run your own NPM-compatible package server, but can probably be handled by checking an update server on boot and displaying a warning in the console indicating the package is out of date, with a link to the new version (think: what happens when
yarnis out of date.)As for checking if the customers are "violating your license" — it really depends on your license. Can you give more detail as to what your licensing terms would be and what you'd want to enforce? E.g. install count, how many servers it can be used on, etc.