On the side I make VST plugins, I publish a few of them on a site called shuriken.se. A few years back I though that this would someday be my main source of income, but thankfully I did not quit my day–job to work on it fulltime.
I have asked for donations in the manual and lately in the plug’s user interface, I though I was going to get donations enough to buy a little hardware here and there and I hoped to be able to buy something nice for myself now and then. As you all know being into making music cost’s a lot.
However, while I think I have had success in getting popular with my plugins, being on the cover disk of at least ten issues of different magazines both in Europe and Asia and 92259 downloads March 20th 2010 I have received 100 US Dollars in donations. 50 of those from one guy, the rest from about five, six other, all donating 10 USD or similar (100 SEK, 10 Austrailan dollars etc).
What I’ve noticed is that users don’t read manuals, they don’t even care if you don’t write one. And no matter how the graphics for your UI looks it’s always ugly to some. Perhaps because the plugins are free or pretty self-explaining the manual is not needed? I don’t know. I don’t really know why I’m telling you guy’s this. There are a few small developers that are making a living of making VST’s but I’m not gotta be one of them. Perhaps iPad fart applications?
Here are the numbers of the downloads I’ve parsed out of the server-logs, at the bottom is the calculation of how much I’ve received donations per download for.
Kerrstin windows: 4107
Kerrstin os x: 1819
Kerrstin windows 1.2: 9623
Kerrstin os x 1.2: 6362
Copyshop windows: 7049
Copyshop os x: 4560
Repeatler UB os x: 1520
SqakAttack windows: 4563
SqakAttack os x: 2580
Berrtill windows: 17247
Berrtill os x: 8805
Shredder windows: 6364
Shredder os x: 4919
Eckel windows: 4237
Eckel os x: 1835
BitTest windows: 0
BitTest os x: 754
A total of: 92259
Every plug downloaded has had a donation for $ .00108390509327003327
Every plug downloaded has had a donation for SEK .00777918685439902882
Well, just because someone downloads your plugins does not mean they actually use them. Most people seem to download all kinds of plugins, they test them and are usually disappointed, never using most of their downloads again. Unlike with physical objects, one can’t give downloads back, so you may get the wrong impression there are that many people actually using your plugins. Probably you have to divide the downloads by 100 to get the number of real users.