We want to offer a free trial period for a couple of our apps, but then bill monthly or annually to keep them active. We don’t want to spend too much time implementing our own solution when monday’s marketplace will eventually have its own monetization features.
What are other app developers using right now to bill and control monday app usage? I know @basdebruin has worked something out, so would love to hear from you and anyone else who has put something in place.
We used to use WHMCS License manager for selling software years ago, but that seems unnecessarily clunky for monday.com apps.
As I was mentioned let me explain what I did. First of all, I don’t think there is an off-the-shelf solution for this. There are tons of options available nut they all need some integration work.
My monday apps (the backend of them that runs on a hosted server) are using a database table (called purchases). Whenever an app is installed in a monday account my backend will be called (I am using custom triggers for my integrations). My app backend does a few things:
checks if there is a token (token table) and if not do the oAuth handshake
checks if there is a purchase record and if not create one and sets a trial date
On every use of the app my backend checks if the trial period is almost over (to issue a notification with a warning) and when the trial period is over it stops working (code just returns without doing actual actions). You have to have something like this in place in the backend of your apps. I don’t have experience with (dash)board views, so can’t tell if the same setup will work for those.
Now we need to have something in place to set the trial date to - or in case of a monthly subscription move the trial date forward a month - when receiving a payment. For my shop (running on a WordPress site) I use a plugin Easy Digital Downloads. For me EDD was simpler to use and configure than the number 1 wooCommerce as EDD is focussed on digital products. EDD plugin is free, but you probably need some pain plugins (like VAT calculations and payment gateways). EDD does not have a subscription model, but there are add-on that provide this functionality.
At this moment I am not using subscriptions. Uninstalling the app will trigger the unsubscibe event (per board). If you want to use that you need to keep track if there are any other boards this app is used in. When you want to charge per month / per board there is no need to do so off course.
My app are priced one-off per monday account so that makes live easier. I would say a user always have to cancel the subscription on the shop side of things, not by removing the app. Compare to selling your car, the insurance subscription will still be charged to you
Thank you so much for starting this important conversation! I’m glad you acknowledge @basdebruin contributino and expertise in building apps as well!
Bas, thanks so much for providing your own experience and line of thought here - I’m sure that would be extremely helpful to tons of users before the Marketplace is fully fleshed out.
Those are great points! I’ll have to double-check those with the team just to make sure we can provide the most relevant answers at this point in time - when I get more information about hose, I’ll reply in this thread.
At this time our marketplace will not release with any monetization built in. That said, we do want to add monetization in the future, and we’ll take your feedback into consideration when we release it.
As y’all mentioned, it’s up to individual app developers to implement their own monetization – and you’re free to do it in whatever way makes sense for you.
Adding monetization to the Marketplace will need serious attention, especially related to international taxes. In Europe we have to charge tax in every transaction to an European individual. If sold to a company you need to have proof (through 3 evidences) that your product (or service) does not leave Europe, the client has a valid VAT id and a valid address. Succes . It does not matter if your business is registered in Europe or elsewhere.
To make it even worse. If you charge taxes to European customers (as you should) you collect the VAT but you also have to declare this to the tax authorities of that country. If your total revenue is less than 10 - 12 KEuro (depends per country) you may use the tax rates of the country where your business is registered or the tax rate of the country where your customer is registered. Then there is MOSS (mini one stop shop) that is invented “to make life easier” [not a joke]. This allows that you declare taxes in other European country to your local tax authority. And off course… because of the Covid-19 crisis every European country did / did not make temporary changes to their VAT rates. This all is really complex stuff and luckily most webshop software and plugins have solutions for this (checking VAT numbers, gathering proof, calculating up-to-date VAT rates etc).
There will be an additional level of complexity if monetization is handled by a Marketplace. Where is that Marketplace registered, who pays who, which VAT rates to use, where to declare your taxes, how to gather proof of delivery etc etc…
It would be very nice is monday can shine a light on early ideas regarding monetization. From a birds eye view I would almost say: let monday.com do the financial transaction with the user (as they have all financial systems in place) and do kind of kickback to the app owner(s), almost like it currently works with partners selling monday licenses.
@basdebruin Thanks for all this info! After reading the start of this thread I was prepping my team to begin to develop some sort of monthly subscription however since most of the client base seems to be in Europe and we are based in the U.S I dont even want to begin with that!
I totally agree monday.com should have a billing system similar to how you describe. I think its important it includes ways to bill per user per month as well! Not that I want to give monday.com any ideas but it seems like an easy way to make a small % on apps sold on the market place as well .
Hey everybody,
great discussion and wanted to give some clarity about our roadmap and plans in terms of billing.
It something that we are thinking a lot about and wanted to share with you our thoughts on the matter right now.
We plan to have a supporting billing of our own for the marketplace,
but I would estimate that we would get to it only during 2021.
We plan to have an integration with stripe or other provider with a guide how to implement your own monetization flow in the upcoming months.
In terms of the billing model, we think of a subscription model and not a one time payment.
We will also take number of users as part of it. We also want to support a trial period.
You can always start with a free app and make it paid whenever you want.
Another excellent (European-based in the Netherlands) payment gateway well worth looking at is Mollie. I use it for a non-profit website for our “shop” and it works perfectly. Always good to have some competition! Mollie - Accept online payments today.
Yes, Mollie is an excellent Payment Provider too. I started off with PayPal and just recently switched to Stripe. When integrating payment providers there is a lot to consider.
How does it interface to your shop? What is the end user experience? PayPal for instance leads your customer to their side to complete payments. Stripe is not doing that, your customer experiences just one checkout page. That is: if Stripe integrates with your webshop software.
What are the transaction costs? You can hardly compare as they all have different rates (most of the time a mixture between a flat rate and a percentage) for different thing (are card national / international, which card is it AEX, Visa, MC)?
Than there is tax and I was just reading last night about the impact of selling to UK after Brexit. Where pre-Brexit you could use MOSS and there was a threshold of 10 KEuro, after Jan 1, 2021 there is no MOSS for the UK anymore and the threshold is lowered to 0. Every transaction you do with the UK need to be taxed, you collect the tax and then pay to the UK tax authorities.
And finally the question of one-time payment vs. subscription models. Subscription models atre very appealing but are you allowed to automatically extend and bil at the end of the subscription period? Probably not in the EU as there are laws that forbid automatic renewal. Plus there is GDPRS - are you even allowed to keep the records of your customers.
All with all: a lot to think of. Hopefully monday.com gives it a good go and helps out by acting as a collection agency in between the customers and the app developers.
Hi, any update timing-wise on this in the meantime? We’ve created a small automation which we would love to share on the marketplace, but since it has running costs, we can only do this once there is some sort of monetization available in the marketplace. Setting up our own monetization system seems completely overkill for our relatively small contribution.
Hi Matias,
Any update on the marketplace monetization? It would be great to have a way to track the progress on this type of marketplace features, or have a plan for each quarter.
Best.
let me explain what I did. First of all, I don’t think there is an off-the-shelf solution for this. There are tons of options available nut they all need some integration work.
and other people interested.