How do you release your plugins into the wild?

[Morphoice]

Ahoi from Europe.
I’ve been making Plugins for a couple of years now using HISE and faust, more serious over the past two years with a JUNO-6, a CS-80 and a Simmons SDSV emulation which I tried to get to sound as close to the original as possible. That alone was some journey, but actually releasing them into the wild is a whole other one.

Would love to hear about your journeys, how and where do you release your work, where do you sell or even advertise it? Do you work with eg Pluginalliance or any of those companies? What are your experiences with them? Do you offer them for free? Do you charge? How do you set your prices?

I found Gumroad to be quite easy and so far went with a pay what you want model, but out of thousands of downloads, barely anyone donates. I’ve been however approached by some bigger companies and wonder if that’s worth looking into. It seems as with everything everybody wants a piece of the cake as long as you bake it and do the hard work. Unfortunately for weeks I am rather busy with relations rather than making actual DSP, which is my actual forte.

How do you all cope?

[Benedict]

The world is habituated to a no-cost mindset these days - with the exception of the 'almost free but uber-Proful' mindset, which is probably worse. All in the middle of a #metoo mindset where most people are looking to ship the most sameful thing as everyone else, hoping to scrape a bit off Trailer Swift or some other big name.

So you do as you have and play the small numbers for a laff, or you get enough chatter to sell out to some WAD Pluginz outfit, OR you do some real work to build something that has no exact competitor. To be very fair, the latter is all but impossible these days as most 'buyers' (users is more accurate) are not open to new/genuine/strong tools as they only want insta-Proful one-knobbers despite the damage they do.