Why isn't selling code a thing?

Hey! I’m selling multiple JavaScript components online some on CodeCanyon and one on Gumroad. It’s slowly growing to be my main income.

I’ve also done an interview on IH which has some more info on this topic: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/3aa3037d0c

See codecanyon.com

I'd say you're missing the fact that unpopular on HN doesn't mean "old and outdated". WordPress has a larger percentage of the market now than it did 5 years ago. WP is far more relevant in 2019 than it was in 2009.

The reason you can find all those themes, templates, etc is because the market for them is vast. You can find similar for other platforms, e.g. shopify, on a smaller scale.

React templates are a bit different since they're not very accessible to non-technical or barely technical site owners. Most people capable of using them are also capable of building them and for whatever reason tend to devalue them.

I'm sure there's a way to sell them, but you'd probably need something larger to overcome the "meh, I'll just build it myself" reaction. Either that or make it super easy for someone who doesn't know JavaScript to use.

There are a few related reasons:

Code by itself doesn't solve any business problems for the usual stakeholder. Existing code to build upon "just" helps developers to be more productive.

Developers also can be be quite opinionated about the software architecture and design of a particular component, even if the exact details of that internal architecture contribute very little to the component's value to the user.

Developers and their employers often are ridiculously cheap when it comes to their own tools and their own productivity. A decent developer in an industrialised economy costs more than $500 per day yet employers and developers alike often refuse to pay the same amount per year for an IDE that'd make them much more productive and opt for free, perhaps not quite as good alternatives instead.

It all boils down to developers most of the time being paid in terms of time spent rather than value created and software development still often being considered menial, if very well-paid, labour. Salaried software developers often don't get to have a say in the product's direction.

Therefore in order to make money selling code you probably need to package it in a way that it solves business problems rather than merely technical ones. Another viable alternative is to sell components to consultants and freelancers in the software business who themselves market their services in terms of business value and outcomes rather than deliverables and time spent for generating code.

Because open source. These themes, starters, plugins etc are a one time thing and accelerate you and then you can move to the next thing. Libraries on the other hand are a more complex artifacts that constantly needs to evolve, is nearly impossible to create bug free code and new use cases are needed constantly, the best way to achieve this by far has been open source.

Yes someone can create a very trivial piece of code and sell it but from a potential buyers perspective you have to ask your self, what am I really getting from this? How many bugs? Are those trivial bugs? Security bugs? What about performance, does it run in X platform?

Often times software created by a single person is very easy to replicate because it is small, whereas open source main value comes not only because it's free but she from the fact it's used by a lot of people were has reported bugs and in many many times submitted the fix for them. L

All that being said it seems people started to forget there was a time where the only way to get software was paying for it, yeah you used to pay to get any library and free software was really really rare. Perhaps when people forget completely a market will emerge until one day we completely forget about open source and someone starts selling the point that software where many people can see the code and modify it it's better. Life goes on cycles it seems

I sell a comment system starting from $5/month (https://just-comments.com) and yet many developers are still willing to implement a system themselves or spend time deploying and configuring an open source source solution.

Therefore, I think the market for React components, npm modules, go packages is quite small. You need to be a developer to use them and, if you are, there are plenty of open source projects or you can build smth yourself.

I know only some libs which are being sold successfully like https://www.highcharts.com But I think this is the kind of library that would take a lot of time to re-implement with uncertain outcomes. And in this case, developers would buy if they need the unique functionality the lib has to offer, and, if it's for the company or a client.

I think selling machine learning models could be more promising but I would sell them as the part of a machine learning service. There are services by AWS, for example, which offer you automatic models and you just upload your data and get results.

It is, just not a big thing. I have a side-product selling code (https://usegravity.app) and make decent income from it.

There are definitely developers out there who will pay for code that saves time or makes life easier.

I was mostly surprised by how much they will pay. Some of my competitors are charging upwards of $1000+ too.

Because it changes too fast. will probably be stale by the time you buy it. (BTW there are places to buy , e.g. javascript games etc, and they are great)

I think selling ML models might be a big thing in a few years.

There's https://gitstore.app/ and https://git.market/
But yea, the market does seem to be a lot smaller.