Unlock

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

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

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

Fantastic idea, looks really promising!

Congratulations @philo01 on launching Unlock! I've been following its development for a while and I genuinely think it is a fantastic product you've put together. I wish you every success with it!

Now it's time to bring all the private packages I've developed to Unlock I guess :D

Congrats on the launch @philo01, stoked to finally see this out there! I've been a beta user of Unlock for a couple of months now and I have to say that it does *everything* that I want, and it does it all well. We (https://hammerstone.dev) sell a Laravel package that makes it easy for developers to build flexible filter systems (https://twitter.com/aarondfranci...). I originally hand-rolled a distribution system for Composer that worked ok, but was a huge pain and lacked a lot of the features that Unlock has by default. Unlock's licensing system is well thought through and robust. It makes it easy for me to add people to special licensing schemes easily (early access, etc), and it syncs to the Composer distribution without any effort on my part. It also handles time-based, or major-release-based expiration, which is perfect for us. Creating a new release is simple too, all you do is tag it on GitHub. That's it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The best part though is that Unlock can handle payment for you if you want. It's like a hosted Stripe Checkout for selling your code. As a developer, I can focus on writing my software and not have to worry about writing software to sell my software.