Contributing Technology Writer
Addons are the lifeblood of platforms as a service (PaaS). They provide all of the critical requirements so that applications have a chance of running through a vendor’s platform environment.
In this article, we’ll explore everything about add-ons, from what they are and who makes them, to the developer’s hellscape that is Heroku and the average add-ons marketplace, shining a light on your way out.
In the next article, we'll compare the experience of selling addons via Render vs Heroku vs Digital Ocean—with a focus on profits and freedoms, and we'll introduce you to a brand new developers' marketplace that's going to change the way you feel about selling add-ons.
What is an add-on?
Addons are externally hosted services that provide ready-to-go functionality to your app, saving you the trouble of digging into your code, as well as the very real trouble of adding weight to your backend.
Another way to put it is that add-ons are modular application components that “bolt onto” base applications to provide additional functionality and capability.
We’re talking about services that are critical to application deployments, the same way that electricity, gas, heating, and waste disposal are essential to you moving into that new house.
The building contractors don’t build and manage those systems, they outsource them—and application developers outsource the development and hosting of critical services by “bolting” ready-to-go, ready-made add-ons onto their applications.
What’s not an add-on?
Developers who make use of an application or platform regularly, but feel there’s room for improvement and further functionality, might decide to stay up late for a couple of weeks to make a plugin or extension that meets their needs.
A good example might be a password manager for Google Chrome or any of the other major browsers, or an inventory organizer for World of Warcraft.
We’ve got nothing against these nifty DIY afterthoughts, we’ve used many of them, and we love them—but they’re not what we’re talking about when we say “addons.”
Let’s be clear. When we say “addons,” we’re talking instead about critical services that can be added to your app or PaaS stack prior to deployment to extend its functionality—with an emphasis on the word, “critical.”
Who makes add-ons and for what purpose?
Addons come with the cost of a subscription—and that subscription pays for hosting of the service as well, so you’re not adding any weight to your app.
So who makes them and for what purpose?
Scenario one: As a solution for PaaS devs
Your team has developed an innovative PaaS product that’s carving its niche online. During testing, your devs were challenged to develop an elegant add-on solution that solves a complex but rather common problem for PaaS product devs in general.
The add-on could be a security add-on that guards against sophisticated attacks, a manager for your databases, a Postgres database, a content management system, a global CDN, a marketing automation email/SMS service, an image processing tool, or a range of other options.
The add-on can bolt onto all sorts of applications, providing a cost-effective, ready-to-go service that stops devs having to reinvent the wheel. You know it should be a lucrative product in its own right—if only you knew how to sell it.
Scenario two: To fill a market gap
You run a successful PaaS product and you’ve recently developed an addon as an upgrade feature. Let’s say it’s a utility that looks up IP addresses to tell you their City and State.
When you searched for an add-on to meet this need, you found nothing. Your PaaS provider, let’s say it’s Heroku, doesn’t even have a category for this type of addon in its Elements marketplace, so you know it’s innovative.
You realize how broad a market the same utility can be applied to in the PaaS vendor space. Other companies on Heroku would pay good money for an addon like this so that they don’t have to make it themselves.
What’s more, thanks to this add-on, your competitors have now become your clients, and you’ve got the convenience of quick service provisioning for your new clients via the Heroku (or another PaaS) platform. Keep in mind, you’ve bridged the gap to a client base that was out of reach before.
Scenario three: To revolutionize how things are done
Or, you looked at a platform like Heroku, that’s used by major players including Slack, GitHub, Milgun, and FaceBook, and you not only saw a gap in the market for a critical, widely needed service—but you also wanted to revolutionize how a certain thing is done—so you made it.
Your startup team specializes in the development of neat, useful, or unique add-ons that make it much, much easier for other people to get their software, SaaS product, PaaS product, or app to market. Perhaps you've made one great add-on, perhaps you've made more.
Because you're the hosting provider, they're lightweight but heavily functional for your users. You're something of a serial entrepreneur, but you’ve grown disillusioned at the state of the add-ons market.
This is how add-ons get developed, either as a necessity or as a passion (or both), and these are typical scenarios for countless devs who wish they could sell their add-ons for a fair profit. Luckily, we’ll offer solutions in our next article.
Why are addons important?
Addons dramatically expedite parts of development so that products can reach market sooner. They do away with huge chunks of work to streamline dev-X so that developers can focus on the unique, innovative, and original parts of the project.
We wouldn’t advance nearly as fast as we do in the SaaS, PaaS, and application development spaces without ready-to-go, externally-hosted services or add-ons.
Ready-to-go add-ons mean you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so your apps can be developed, get to market, and evolve into better things, faster. But what about scalability? That’s where “externally-hosted” ready-to-go add-ons become really important.
Managed hosting of critical-service addons means that companies can develop a platform or application, start with a handful of users, but quickly scale to millions of users without their database, user management system, or caching utility crumpling under the load.
If you weren't expecting exponential growth and your web servers had to suddenly store and manage all 10 million users’ data, it could cost you millions—which is why critical services are much better when they’re externally managed and hosted.
In summary, add-ons are important because they meet the multitudinous infrastructural service and service scalability needs of a vast and active development community and of thousands of individual developers, startups, and enterprises the world over.
They give you more memory, zero downtime, reduced load times, load balancing, and a range of other unique and specific benefits—it all depends on what addons we're talking about.
They almost always give you an exponentially shorter development timeline and all of the cost savings incumbent on that. Addons are, in many ways, the heroes of IT progress and evolution, but not as a business model, and not to your bank account as an add-ons dev. Addons.io is here to change all that.
How do addons go to market?
Add-ons always seem to be the sidekick, tied to a specific platform like Digital Ocean or Heroku, and rarely earn their money’s worth when you consider the names who use them and the process and resources you’ve put in.
Typically, add-ons have been marketed and sold on PaaS, such as Heroku or Digital Ocean.
Oftentimes, these add-ons were developed with a single platform in mind, what's more, they're often marketed by that platform as a side hustle to increase revenue—for itself. For example, it’s rumored that Heroku takes $300M in annual revenue, with $150M coming from its addon marketplace.
If you consider the fact that 13 million apps have been created on the Heroku platform (with 30 000+ companies active), that they maintain 200+ addons in their marketplace, and that monthly add-on subs range from free to $10K/month (with Heroku taking 30%), it’s easy to believe that it might be even more.
These top PaaS companies, or container-based cloud platforms and PaaS providers, like Heroku, shamelessly boost their own business via third-party addons, taking a massive chunk of the turnover in sketchy vendor agreements, locking in buyers and developers in a way that's lucrative—but not for the devs putting in the work.
For this reason, OneMoreCloud, the #1 provider of managed, production-ready, scalable search engine add-ons that are used in some of the world's applications, started as a Heroku-only add-on (marketed on Heroku) but have since gone independent.
Instead of paying Heroku a cut, Heroku is now one of their customers, as are Pinterest, GitHub, wikiHow, and a range of familiar names—and they’re still being provisioned via Heroku as well. Independence is one thing, but what about marketing? Where will you, as a small dev team or individual developer who's made a great add-on, find new customers?
Marketing via a PaaS marketplace makes your product accessible to thousands of existing customers looking for critical-service add-ons for the apps or platforms they're developing. Convenience, exposure, marketing, it's all there—but how do the profits look, and what about growth? That, dear readers, is the problem.
Breaking out of the Heroku stranglehold
You may be one of the best add-on devs around, with an essential add-on that can streamline application development for tens of thousands of teams worldwide, but selling your subscription model add-on via a leading PaaS market is not going to make you any money.
A Heroku add-on that's sold exclusively on Heroku to Heroku users would be possible but not profitable—not in terms of getting your effort's worth. Plus, since you'd be hosting the service, Heroku's 30% cut could see you slowly crippled as popularity in your add-on gained.
AddOns.io's history is tied to that of Heroku because Heroku is the root of the problem, with other leading PaaS marketplaces following suit.
“When Heroku launched in 2007 and provided hosting for applications, it was unique because most of the infrastructure plumbing was abstracted away so developers could focus on their code and not on deploying it,” states Addons founder, Jonathan Siegel Esq.
Almost immediately, developers needed more tooling to allow their applications to thrive. Heroku responded by adding application performance monitoring through a third-party addon (NewRelic).
This began the development of one of the first addon marketplaces in the belly of Heroku. Most addons have started within Heroku before stretching their wings and finding other opportunities.
A few years ago, a company called Manifold launched to offer addons the ability to exist outside of Heroku. Unfortunately for the addon community, but fortunately for the Manifold team, they were acquired by Snyk before they could complete their vision.
Today, addons that want to expand their reach beyond Heroku have to find other PaaS platforms, evaluate their marketplaces, and decide whether it is worth the effort to build an integration with the platform in order to capture revenue available on the platform."
What would be better is if there were PaaS marketplaces that were more addon-developer friendly in terms of commission structures and in terms of hero-ing add-ons instead of selling them as an afterthought integration to boost profits for the platform itself.
Doing away with dodgy revenue share models (in favor of slimmer figures) would mean that prices could, potentially, be lowered for end users as well.
What addon creators need is a platform that exists solely as an add-on marketplace for independent developers who need addons, and independent developers who make addons.
In our next article, we compare the leading PaaS marketplaces for addons, so be sure to check it out!
A better choice for devs: Addons.io
Addons.io is a fair-trade marketplace that focuses on addons, and only addons. We believe in highlighting addons as the critical services that expedite, streamline, diversify, and scale application and PaaS development for all.
We don't believe in all this 30% rev-share BS. We charge a revenue share of 20% for vendors and, otherwise, vendor and buyer sign-up is free.
Whether you build, buy, or both, Addons.io's goal is to ease your process, raise your profits, and leave you with the freedom (and cash flow) you need to evolve in fast-flowing waters.
We've cast our nets wide so that you can do the same. We've made Addons.io a safe place for veteran devs and dabblers alike. So, why not Sign Up today?
Addons.io connects builders, buyers, and sellers–without the middleman—for critical-service sourcing that’s quick, capable, and cost-effective.