Genuine question: what is the intended business model for independent Frappe app developers?

[BatchNepal]

We’re trying to understand what Frappe expects the long-term economic model for third-party app developers to be.

Marketplace apps must be open source, including paid apps. Frappe Cloud takes the first $500 of app revenue and then uses an 80/20 publisher/platform split.

For small extensions and community apps, I understand the model.

What I’m struggling to understand is how this works for someone investing substantially in a standalone product.

Say a team spends several months to years building and maintaining a complex application on Frappe ecosystem. They aren’t an implementation company and don’t want consulting to be their main business. Their actual product is the app.

Is the intended model:

• paid open source;
• support contracts;
• hosted services;
• private distribution outside Marketplace;
• or something else?

I ask because the current incentives seem to push valuable commercial functionality outside the Frappe app itself.

The rational architecture becomes:

open-source Frappe connector → proprietary hosted service

rather than:

great commercial Frappe application

That seems like it could eventually limit the ecosystem.

We’d genuinely like to hear from Marketplace maintainers who are making meaningful product and market presence. What has actually worked?

[rmehta]

@BatchNepal

Marketplace apps must be open source, including paid apps. Frappe Cloud takes the first $500 of app revenue and then uses an 80/20 publisher/platform split.

Frappe does not take the first $500, the distribution starts after you hit $500

@BatchNepal

What I’m struggling to understand is how this works for someone investing substantially in a standalone product.

First, open source is not a business model, but the Frappe ecosystem will be open source first - this has been the constant commitment.

@BatchNepal

Say a team spends several months to years building and maintaining a complex application on Frappe ecosystem. They aren’t an implementation company and don’t want consulting to be their main business. Their actual product is the app.

You should get the funding from the customer - a lot of providers do this.

@BatchNepal

I ask because the current incentives seem to push valuable commercial functionality outside the Frappe app itself.

The best model IMO is to offer some paid services in-app. This is how the Wordpress ecosystem does it. Apps like e-invoicing are ideal because you can provide an integration + gateway to a 3rd party service. Same can be extended to e-commerce integrations.

@BatchNepal

open-source Frappe connector → proprietary hosted service

correct.

From a purely commercial POV, the open source is just “advertisement” or a demonstration of your services. Also since software is cheap now, specially with LLMs, hosting remains the only sustainable model in theory.