I've spent a lot of time thinking about software marketplaces.
And the more I looked at them, the more I kept coming back to the same question:
When did the marketplace become the most important party in the transaction?
A developer builds something useful.
They spend months or years writing it, debugging it, documenting it, supporting it, and keeping it alive.
A buyer decides that work is valuable enough to pay for.
The marketplace connects the two.
Yet somehow we've ended up in a world where the middleman can take an enormous percentage of the sale, decide how developers interact with their customers, dictate how software is sold, promote whoever pays for visibility, and sometimes make it difficult for buyers to retain access to software they've already paid for.
I don't think marketplaces are inherently bad.
I'm building one.
I just think we've gotten the incentives wrong.
A marketplace should earn its cut
Running a marketplace isn't free.
Payments cost money. Fraud costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Moderation costs money. Support costs money.
And discovery has real value.
So I don't think the answer is "marketplaces should charge nothing."
But I do think the marketplace should have to justify what it takes.
That's one of the ideas behind Lyrinox Market, a software marketplace I've built and recently opened in public preview.
Our highest platform fee is 9%.
As sellers build a stronger track record on the marketplace, that fee can fall to 6%, then 3%.
And our highest-performing sellers can ultimately qualify for a 1% platform fee.
The idea is pretty simple:
If you're helping make the marketplace valuable, the marketplace shouldn't punish you for succeeding.
I'd rather make a little bit from a healthy ecosystem than extract as much as possible from every transaction.
Buyers shouldn't be an afterthought either
Lower seller fees are easy to advertise.
But there's another side to this.
I don't want to build a marketplace that's amazing for sellers because buyers get screwed instead.
A healthy marketplace needs both sides to trust it.
One problem I've become particularly interested in is software ownership.
We've slowly normalized the idea that paying for software doesn't necessarily mean you get to keep using what you paid for.
Subscriptions make sense for some things.
If you're continuously providing compute, storage, hosting, data, or another ongoing service, there's an ongoing cost.
But downloadable software isn't automatically a service just because recurring revenue is attractive.
So we created something called Lyrinox Major Version Ownership, or LMVO.
The basic idea is:
Buy a major version once. Own that major version.
If you buy version 3, you get updates within version 3.
When version 4 eventually comes out, the developer can charge for that upgrade.
You can buy it.
Or you can keep using version 3.
Your existing software doesn't suddenly become a rental.
It gives developers a reason to make major upgrades worth buying while giving customers confidence that a purchase actually means something.
What happens when a developer disappears?
This is another uncomfortable problem in software.
Developers disappear.
Companies shut down.
Projects get abandoned.
Sometimes the developer simply doesn't have the time anymore.
Normally, the buyer is the one left holding the bag.
So we built the Lyrinox Continuity Program.
It's voluntary.
A developer can enroll a product and enter into a Continuity Agreement with us.
If that product is permanently abandoned under the conditions of that agreement, previously enrolled releases can remain available rather than simply disappearing with the developer.
The developer still owns their work.
We're not taking their intellectual property.
We're trying to answer a different question:
How do we give buyers some confidence that software they depend on won't simply vanish one morning?
I think marketplaces should be thinking about problems like that.
You shouldn't be able to buy trust
Another thing I really dislike is when marketplaces blur the line between quality and advertising.
If something is at the top because somebody paid for it to be there, that's an advertisement.
There's nothing inherently wrong with advertising.
But don't pretend it's a recommendation.
Lyrinox Market's discovery and reputation systems are designed around actual signals: product quality, maintenance, customer experience, seller history, reviews, documentation, and other things that tell us whether someone is doing a good job.
We also have a Certification Program.
Certification can involve a paid review process because performing a real review costs money.
But you're paying for the review.
You're not buying the result.
That's an important distinction.
Developers deserve to make money
There's a strange tension in software culture that I've never particularly understood.
We want independent developers.
We want alternatives to enormous technology companies.
We want open ecosystems.
We want people maintaining the tools we depend on.
Then someone asks $20 for something they spent six months building and suddenly that's unreasonable.
Good software takes work.
Maintenance takes work.
Documentation takes work.
Support takes work.
Security updates take work.
I want Lyrinox Market to be a place where somebody can build an excellent piece of software, charge a fair price for it, treat their customers well, and build an actual sustainable business.
And I want buyers to feel good about paying them.
Those goals aren't contradictory.
Treating developers well and treating customers well are the same long-term strategy.
I'm not trying to build the biggest marketplace
At least, that's not the goal I'm optimizing for.
I want to build one people trust.
I'd rather have 1,000 excellent products from developers who actually care about them than 100,000 abandoned scripts, AI-generated junk, misleading listings, and products designed around squeezing another subscription out of somebody.
I'd rather have fewer sellers making real money than enormous signup numbers that look impressive in a pitch deck.
I'd rather lose some short-term revenue than design incentives that make the marketplace worse five years from now.
Maybe that makes growth slower.
I'm okay with that.
This is live today
Lyrinox Market isn't a mockup, a waitlist, or a marketplace I'm hoping to build someday.
It's live right now in public preview.
You can create an account, create a seller profile, publish product listings, browse the marketplace, and actually use the systems I've described above.
The public preview exists because I want those systems exposed to real developers and real use before I call the marketplace finished.
There will be things we've gotten wrong.
There will be edge cases we haven't considered.
And there will probably be ideas that sound great today that need to change after thousands of real developers and buyers start interacting with them.
That's part of why I'm writing this here.
DEV is full of exactly the people I want criticizing these ideas.
If you're a developer, you don't have to wait for a launch to try it. You can sign up today, create a seller profile, make a listing, explore how the marketplace works, and tell me what you think is missing.
So I'm curious:
If you could redesign the software marketplace from scratch, what would you change?
What do existing marketplaces do that drives you insane?
What do they actually do well that a new marketplace shouldn't throw away?
And if you sell software yourself:
What would a marketplace have to offer for you to actually want to sell there?
I'm building my answer to those questions with Lyrinox Market, and the public preview is live now at https://market.lyrinox.com.
I'd genuinely like to hear yours.
I'm the founder of Lyrinox Technologies, the company building Lyrinox Market. The marketplace is currently in public preview and open for developers and buyers to explore.
Top comments (0)