Sustainable ecosystem

Premium extensions have been introduced to offer extension developers a way to develop sustainably. Building open source is a burden, keeping an extension bug-free is one thing, implementing new features gradually increases this burden.

Premium extensions offer these developers a way to gradually become sustainable using single or recurring payments for extensions that are more complex or provide more value than simpler extensions. These extensions are bound to strict terms.

Using a premium extension

You can see a list of premium extensions you've subscribed to on your subscriptions page. You can filter the extensions list by premium extensions too.

Once you've subscribed to a premium extension follow the instructions on the subscriptions page which requires making a change to your composer.json and setting an auth token for the extiverse.com domain.

Becoming a premium extension developer

In order to publish your own premium extensions you need to:

• Sign up and be verified on Stripe.com.
• Read and understand the extension developer terms.
• Have a private git repository ready to be published as premium extension on GitHub.com, GitLab.com or Bitbucket.com. Gitee.com is in the works.
• Contact luceos#0001 on Discord.

At this point a team will be created for you under which your premium extensions are listed.

Configuration of your premium extensions

When publishing a premium extension, you have a couple of options to suit your needs.

• Privately listing: if you enable private listing, the premium extension will never be shown publicly. It can however be used by yourself or subscribers.

Once published, you can configure your extension plans:

• You can charge recurringly or once. For "once" access to the premium extension is provided indefinitely.
• You can provide a trial period for your plan. Under normal circumstances you do not need this. But for more mature extension it might be a good way to allow users to give it a spin.
• You can mark a plan for use by extended use. Standard use implies for use by one person/customer for non profit. Extended implies for use by one person/customer for profit. Read the premium extension terms for more information.
• Max uses allow you to limit the number of times users subscribe to the plan, once exhausted the plan will be automatically disabled.
• Invite only allows you to make a plan private. Only by using a specific (randomized) key can someone see the plan and subscribe to it. You can share a link to the recipient in the following two ways:
  • By appending ?key=the-random-key-here to your extension page URL which then lists the private plan in addition to any public ones.
  • Or by providing a direct link to the hidden plan by appending /the-random-key-here to the URL of your extension page.
• The repository access option allows you to share actual access to the repository to any user with a subscription that connected their git account for the service your premium extension repository is hosted on. Use this feature only if you understand fully well what it means.