Licensing, Payment, Security

[Dale.Bartlett]

Is there a common means to sell and secure addins? It seems that this part of building a marketable product is more complex than the addin itself. I fully understand and accept that the code cannot be 100% protected from hackers, this is not necessary. What is necessary is an automated means to accept payment and distribute licences with minimum impact on the end-user, or the corporation purchasing multiple licences. This seems to require ASP.NET and Windows-based web servers to host the download web site.
This article adndevblog prompted research that took me to: Infralution Licensing System and Infralution IPN.NET

Thoughts? Dale

[Mark.Lancaster]

@Dale.Bartlett 

Addons for what?  Autodesk product?

Are you using the Autodesk Exchange app store? 

https://apps.autodesk.com/en

[David_Robison]

Yes, everything surrounding licensing and collecting payment can be just as much work as the actual product itself.

Here's the various products we use at Design Master:

Credit Card Processor: PayPal Pro. You can use PayPal as a credit card processor without it being obvious PayPal is being used. Cost is $30 / month + fees on your sales. For another $30 / month you can set up recurring payments.

Check-out / Shopping Cart: E-junkie. They charge a low flat rate to handle the ordering process for you. I like them because they do not charge you a percentage of sales.

Licensing: I started with LogicNP. They work well for basic licensing. You can do online activation with them but you have to host it yourself. One-time cost for the software.

Recently I added SoftwareKey to the mix. They have a hosted online activation service that I use. There's a monthly charge for that based on the number of people who activated licenses. It's by far the most reasonably cost option available. It is in the $10's to $100's per month for my licensing. All the other options are in the $1,000's.

I use LogicNP for the free-trial portion of my licensing and SoftwareKey for the paid licensing. You could probably do it all with SoftwareKey but I started with LogicNP so it was easier to keep that involved and layer SoftwareKey on top.

I offer these products as an example of a set that works. There are quite a few alternatives available for all of them. If you are interested in more details, I am happy to provide more information on the forums or by private message.

[Dale.Bartlett]

Yes Mark, AutoCAD and Revit Addins. I may use the app store as well, but in any case need to sell and license independently. Dale

[Dale.Bartlett]

Hi David,

Thank you very much for the detailed response. This represents a lot of time, research, and tears  (I guess) on your part, so much appreciated. I will admit up front that although I have decades of coding, I have done very little that is  web-based. We have a new web site under way that is WordPress based with WooCommerce suggested as the eCommerce tool. The on-line activation and IPN Server from Infralution require ASP.NET and Windows server hosting, so this is another consideration. If you care to provide more detailed information, I am sure it would be appreciated by the community so best to use this forum rather than PM. Thanks again, I will look into those products. Dale 

[CADbloke]

I have used ILS for a couple of years now, it has been pretty good. I have tinkered with it a fair bit (I paid for the source code). The developer is responsive in the forums and email which is good.

I used https://wyday.com/limelm/ for a while and they were good too but I wanted more control at the time.

You're right about the licensing & selling thing being just as much workload as the actual app. By now you will have discovered the ADN IPN example on Github is somewhat pointless. Don't cry (yet) - Autodesk's IPN is very similar to PayPal's so model your listener on an existing PayPal one. I'd love to tell you more but I'm literally right in the middle of doing exactly that right now to get my app(s) in the Autodesk store. Gotta do a ribbon button CUIX for it too, dammit, because don't even.

For sales outlets outside the Autodesk store, have a look at Paddle and (I use) FastSpring. I got in early at FastSpring so it may be an expensive option these days, I don't pay any monthly fee. For more on this see http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=50609.30

Installers. Holy ####. The packager at https://github.com/cyrillef/apps.exchange.packager is what I currently use, although somewhat modified (ok, a lot). The Stockholm syndrome is strong in Wix, the Windows Installer. Ok, you can cry now.

If you're thinking of building an automatic updater, try this one thing: forget it, YAGNI.

To answer your question, is there a unified best practise - NOPE. You'd think there would be but ... no, it's a great big #### jigsaw puzzle.