This marketplace is intended as our contribution to the Solar2D community. We're committed to hosting and maintaining this service, and to simplifying the process of monetising the assets that you develop. You're welcome to host any number of plugins, templates, and other such assets here provided that they're of potential interest to other Solar2D developers. You can provide your content free of charge, or for a fee of your choosing.
As a web and game development company, this marketplace is not a primary revenue source for us and is not particularly expected to be profitable. Providing this service incurs a cost to us though, which our pricing model intends to cover.
In the interests of transparency, this document aims to clarify how you're charged and why.
We won't charge you anything at all! Donating your own time and expertise to create something that others can benefit from is an awesome gesture that we're happy to support.
We use Stripe Connect to set you up with an Express account as a merchant. Any sales made through our marketplace are then between you and your customer directly. We take a 15% cut from each of the sales that you make. This is charged instantly and taken from the sale itself, so the amount you receive in to your Express account is already minus our fee, and as such is 100% yours to cash out at any time.
Stripe Connect charges us USD $2 monthly for each active Express account, as per their pricing model. An active account is one that has made at least one sale in the given month. This means that the first sale you make in any given month incurs a USD $2 charge to us which might be more than our usual 15% fee, subject to the price you set against your asset. As such, we instead charge USD $3 or 15%, whichever is greater, on your first sale of the month to cover this charge from Stripe.
The content that you upload is hosted in Rackspace Cloud storage buckets for performance, scalability, and redundancy. Rackspace charges us a monthly fee of GBP £0.07 per 1GB stored, and GBP £0.08 per 1GB transferred, which includes both the initial transfer into the bucket during your upload, and the repeat transfers from this bucket to Solar2D developers using your content, when their Solar2D compiler fetches referenced plugins or they choose to download your asset via the marketplace directly.
Stripe also charges us 0.25% + USD $0.25 of each pay-out.
The 15% or USD $3 fee which we charge is intended to cover these Rackspace costs, and the Stripe pay-out costs.
We also incur hardware and bandwidth costs for running the web server hosting this marketplace, storage and further bandwidth costs for running the backup systems, developer contractor fees for maintaining the marketplace itself, and so on. Such costs are effectively swallowed by QWeb Ltd but the remaining revenue from the cut we charge on sales, after covering Rackspace CDN and Stripe fees, is appreciated in helping to cover these additional costs.
Put simply, we take, with great appreciation, a 15% cut of all sales in return for providing free hosting and distribution of your assets, unless it's your first sale of the month in which case we take a USD $3 cut or 15%, whichever is greater. Our cut is used to cover running costs but this marketplace is effectively not profitable, and not intended to be.