We got sick of giving 30% of our revenue to marketplaces, so we built own licensing logic

Sarka — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:53:04 +0000

Hey guys,

Quick story. A while back, I launched a desktop tool and realized I was losing about $3,000 out of every $10,000 just to "convenience fees" from marketplaces. It wasn't even about the payment processing—it was mostly for the license key generation and basic gatekeeping.

The worst part? I didn't even "own" my customers. No emails, no direct feedback, nothing.

I decided to stop being a tenant on those platforms and built my own backend to handle the heavy lifting.

The logic we went with is pretty simple:

Keep your 30%: We don't touch your sales. We're just the infrastructure. If you sell a $500 seat, you keep $500.

Instant Payouts: Since it connects to your own Stripe/PayPal, you aren't waiting a month for a payout.

Actually own the data: You get the customer emails and can manage activations/notifications directly.

Clean API: It’s basically an "invisible brain" for the app. It handles the key validation and pings the user when their sub is expiring, so I don't have to code that from scratch every time.

I’m curious—how are you guys handling license validation for your apps? Are you still stuck with the big marketplaces' fees, or did you roll your own solution?

If anyone's looking to move away from those 30% cuts, I'm happy to help or chat about how we integrated it.

Sarka

DEV Community: Sarka

We got sick of giving 30% of our revenue to marketplaces, so we built own licensing logic