Binpress Now Lets You Sell Directly To Customers With Its New Storefronts For Digital Goods

Binpress, a company that started off as a source code marketplace for developers, is now launching a new service which the company describes as a “Shopify for digital products.” That is, Binpress is offering developers their own online storefronts, designed specifically for the sale of digital goods – mainly software sold directly to end users, instead of other developers.

CEO Adam Benayoun says the Binpress marketplace isn’t going away, but the storefront solution would be the company’s primary focus going forward. To date, the marketplace has grown to around 1,000 SDKs and libraries, and has paid out $1 million to its developer customers. (Binpress offers the traditional 70/30 split on transactions on its marketplace site.)

templateBut it was in working with those developers that the company stumbled upon this bigger opportunity, explains Benayoun.

“A lot developers reached out to us asking to use the same technology for their own websites.” They wanted to sell their software directly to consumers and was hoping Binpress could help with that, he says. “Setting up a Magento store or a Shopify was too cumbersome for them,” Benayoun notes.

The new product is really just a repackaging of the Binpress technology, designed to make launching your own online storefront a process that only takes a few minutes. For developers selling software, it offers a variety of features to that make handling licensing, support, package management and verification easier than if the developer was running their own website or using another third-party solution, the company claims.

Binpress offers, for example, a licensing wizard tool that can generate licenses automatically for different tiers, allowing customers to upgrade to more expensive versions, or add more seats with a click. Plus, when developers have a new version of their software available, they can upload it to the site, and Binpress will handle alerting customers that the update is now available. There’s also a licensing API available, a private area for managing purchases and tech support, sales and traffic reports, and the option to distribute software to other channels, including the Binpress marketplace.

The service itself is free to use, but Binpress will take 10% of transactions on the storefront. To reduce that percentage and gain access to more features, developers can choose to pay a monthly fee instead (e.g. $49/mo for 2%; $99/mo for 1%; or $199/mo for 0.5%).

The storefront solution soft-launched in December, and now a good number of Binpress customers are transitioning to the new service, says Benayoun. He says that, so far, a few dozen to 100 developers have made the switch but more are in the works.

Binpress is currently based in Mountain View, and has raised $1 million from 500 Startups and a number of angel investors. The company generates revenue, but isn’t yet profitable  They have enough funds for another year of runway, however, the founder says.

The new service to some extent competes with other digital goods storefront providers, like Gumroad, Sellfy, or Selz for example. But many of these competitors focus on helping content creators sell digital goods like audio, digital comics, templates, and other one-off purchases . Meanwhile, Binpress is more specifically enabling sales of tiered and/or upgradable software applications.

The new storefront service is here.