Pay what you want

[FloVanGH]

Maybe a pay what you want system could be help to increase the number of app developers. A part of the money earned with this system could be used for further development of the platform. elementary OS has successfully introduced such a system https://github.com/elementary/appcenter. Since they introduced pay what you want to its app center a bunch of really good new apps were released for elementary OS.

[bhdouglass]

Thanks for the suggestion! I've been following the elementary appcenter's development and we've written down some ideas for how we want to approach this.

[FloVanGH]

Nice to hear. I'll keep an eye on it.

[krille-chan]

A very very simple solution could be:

If the app has a donation option, then just change the "Install" button to a "Buy" button and by pressing the button, redirect the user to the donate page of the app and install the app simultanly.
Because of pay-what-you-want, there is no need to check, if the user really has spend money.

Improvements could be:

• The app author can define a "price", so on the button can be the text: "Buy (2$)"
• On the button should be a dropdownmenu, where the user can choose the option "Install for free"
• Over the button should be a label with the text: "Pay what you want", so the user knows, that this "price" is not forced

With this solution there is no need to implement an own pay-system. The authors can just link the users to their PayPal-account, Liberapay, Patreon, Bitcoin or what they prefer.

This solution could also be a placeholder for a better pay-what-you-want-solution in the future.

[bhdouglass]

Thanks for the idea, we'll keep it in mind when this issue gets worked on!