I’ve had over 13,500 downloads on my Blender extension, and it’s generated about $96 total.
To be clear, I’m not complaining. It’s donation-based through GitHub, and honestly I think it’s awesome anyone has donated at all.
But it did get me thinking about how people in the Blender community approach paying for tools.
For context, the add-on is OpenVAT: a pretty niche vertex animation texture encoder for game engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot). It’s been featured a couple times by 80.lv, has tutorials, etc.
From a dev perspective, it’s kind of an interesting spot:
A lot of users rely on free tools (which is part of what makes Blender great)
But building and maintaining add-ons is non-trivial, especially when supporting multiple engines/pipelines
The new Extensions platform changes visibility a lot vs traditional marketplaces
So I’m curious:
Do you personally buy Blender add-ons? Why / why not?
Do you prefer any specific marketplaces (Blender Market, Gumroad, etc.) over the Extensions platform (Get Addons inside preferences)?
Does “donation-based” vs fixed price change your likelihood to support something?
For devs: what has your experience been like monetizing (or not monetizing) your tools?
Is the Extensions platform enforcing absolute no direct links to paid/upgrade versions a good thing? Or too harsh?
Not trying to push anything here — just genuinely interested how people think about this.