paid VSIX licensing recommendations?

[mrlacey]

Have you built a paid for extension?
If so, how do you handle payment and licensing?
Any 3rd parties you'd recommend to help with this? (or recommend avoiding?)

Any other tips or advice as I consider my first paid (with trial) extensions?

[StevenRasmussen]

Have you built a paid for extension?

Yes! here

If so, how do you handle payment?

The VSIX gallery is a good way to publish the extension and provide some basic info about it but I think ultimately if you're going to build a product you'll want a website to point people to for documentation as well as accepting payments (more on accepting payments in my answer regarding 3rd parties below).

Licensing?

This is always tricky. I've found something that works pretty well for me. My product uses a license server (hosted on the website) to handle registering/unregistering a license key that is provided upon receiving payment. I can also handle registering a license when the client does not have access to the internet... but I rarely need to use this method as most clients allow access to the internet.

Any 3rd parties you'd recommend to help with this? (or recommend avoiding?)

The only 3rd parties I really use right now is with regards to accepting payment. I have the option of accepting PayPal or a CC (which PayPal can do but for some reason, people were really confused and thought you HAD to have a PayPal account and so I provided this option). I use Authorize.Net for the CC integration and the API is decent but I haven't looked at options recently so there may be other better processors out there now. I initially only started off with PayPal as they provide a pretty easy way to accept most forms of payment.

Good luck! It's been worth it for me!

[mrlacey]

thanks.