Hi Product Hunt, I’m super excited to announce the launch of Unlock, a modern, all-in-one product platform for developers to sell, license, and distribute their software. So why Unlock? I was working on my first Electron application a while ago and couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Maybe I would enable me to make a living selling my own products, how cool would that be! However, it turned out setting up billing, licensing, and distribution was easier said than done. I could not find a convenient plug & play solution to ship my application. So, I decided to build my own. Along the way, I noticed this problem: selling software, dealing with licensing and distribution wasn’t just a pain for Electron applications; it was a pain for many different technologies. With Unlock I want to help developers and companies make a living online while they can keep doing what they love to do, which is writing code and shipping new features. Unlock does this by integrating into the existing stack of developers and customers. Push your code to GitHub, and Unlock takes care of billing, licensing, distribution, changelog management, and more. That’s right; you don’t even have to leave your terminal. Unlock supports NodeJS, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Electron applications. Getting started is extremely easy; you can have your first sale and have it distributed to your customer via a private repository protected with a license key within 5 minutes. Setting this up would typically take you weeks or months. And that’s not all; Unlock has some really cool features on the roadmap. For example, a marketplace to boost your product sales, so you don’t have to worry about marketing, GitHub sponsor integration, automatic invites to private GitHub repositories, feedback and idea collection from customers, WordPress plugin and theme updater library, and much more. To help you get started selling online, I’m giving away over 5000 dollars in prizes to celebrate the launch, including a MacBook M1. Be sure to check out the contest page for all the details, but in short, to enter, submit your product to our marketplace. This means you can win prizes while at the same time making a living online! And by the way, if you are a developer who has always wanted to make a living online selling software but you just don’t know where to start. Reach out to me on Twitter, and I’ll be happy to help. Thanks for reading along & have a fantastic day. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback. PS. I have two short (2 minutes) demo videos that I published during the development phase, some things have changed a bit but it gives you an impression of the ease of use: - How to sell your software in two minutes - How to license and distribute your Electron application

Philo Hermans

Unlock

Maker

3yr ago

@sadie thanks! 🎉

Bogomil Shopov - Бого

Threat Modeling e-book

Whohooo! Finally something easy to use. I'll explore more, but my first question is - can I monetize a wordpress plugin?

@bogomep thanks for your comment! Yes, you can monetize a WordPress plugin via Unlock. Users can download the zip file of your plugin or use composer to install and update. Here's a little demo of selling a PHP package (video is from the beta so things might have changed a little bit). I'm working on plug & play library for WordPress plugins and themes so your customers will be able to automatically update plugins and themes. I'm expecting this to be available this month.

Maria

Sealit

Amazing product! Amazing deal! Congratulations on the launch! ^_^ Thank you for implementing this idea and allowing us easy and joyful process of creating! *_*

@maria_brm thanks Maria, it's great to see your positive response! ^_^

@philo01 And it is absolutely deserved! *_* I have one question related to pricing: Starter pack allows selling only via Unlock or on other platforms as well? :))

Thanks! The starter pack allows selling on other platforms as well. This is the same for alle packs except the managed pack. The managed pack allows you to start without any monthly commitment but you have to sell via Unlock and pay a platform transaction fee.

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