My experience is - no way :-)

Hour price for our developer is 70$/hr. Module price is 100$, snowcovered (or others) takes 25%. We are currently between 60-80th position. It is pocket money but not any more - except maybe for first 20 top sellers. Our main business is developing and customization web pages (within DNN framework or classic ASP.NET). One or two our programmers constantly develop our module but because of our own needs. We are far far away from selling 1 module per hour... Ok, it depends on marketing etc (we do not have special marketing department) but this is open market for free product (DNN). Companies with bigger budget also use sharepoint portal and other solutions.

Regards,

Primoz

Just looking at one of the ads here on DNN I see a vendor claiming over 2000 websites running their module.  This module has a number of different licenses available so there is a lot of guestimation involved.  But if you assume an average of $100/module (they have some licenses for $60, some for $200, some for $300), then you are looking at $200K in sales for this one module.  Split that over 2 or three years and you can see what kind of money is available for a single successful module.  I know of other vendors who easily clear $10k month on a single module.  It really depends on your module.  None of the modules that make decent money are simple to build, so if you are going into the module market, just realize that the road to profitability is much longer than going the services route where you can be profitable almost immediately.  But none of this is any different than the software industry as a whole. 

I disagree with Jeff about modules being commodities.  They only seem that way because some vendors treat them that way.  If you only market to people who are price sensitive then you can expect to get forced into a low margin commodity pricing structure.  However, it you target your product at a higher end market by providing the features that they demand, and not thinking that DNN.com or snowcovered is where your customers hang out, then you can easily charge several hundred dollars for your product.  The key, just like everything in business is finding out how to reach your target audience and then targeting your message to that audience.  If you make a killer module that makes it really easy to run a gaming clan site, then you would probably be smart to spend some of your marketing effort on the gaming sites where gamers hang out.  Why do I think this way?  Because I know that companies like CodeGear, and Texas Instruments and many other extremely large companies are not going to balk at a $500 module.  I know many e-commerce site owners that will gladly pay $1000 for software that does what they need.  The fact that the platform is free does not change their view of how much to pay for the software that runs on the software.  A Microsoft Windows license can be as cheap as $99 yet you do not have to look very far to find software that costs thousands of dollars, and when properly marketed and developed, that software sells very well.

And yet, another beautiful point detailed here.  I have to agree with the final few lines in the last paragraph... we (my "day" job) are just coming off of an intranet portal that cost us upwards $40k/yr and that was with a discount (normally 60k, I think).  They were outrageous in their pricing, their support blew chunky monkeys, their "modules" were mediocre at best, and yet they had hundreds of customers around the country.

When I first started the job where I work, I was quiet about it... I didn't want to ruffle any feathers.  After a year of working with that portal and trying to create my own plugins for it, it became evident that is was a complete POS and that we could do better.  On that note, my job previous had dealt primarily with SharePoint (WSS 1.x, so the crappy variety) so I knew what a portal *should* be capable of.  I started looking into DNN at the time and was impressed with calibre and quality of the software and the modules that were available. 

Being used to paying bookoo bucks for a crappy portal, our company has no qualms about shelling out $50-100 for a module and we've purchased quite a few.  On the same token, there were several things we wanted to do that either were not out there or were only "close but no cigar".  I was able to develop several modules custom to our needs but see the value in them, and that is where I turned around, brought it home, and rewrote it from the ground up to be more "general use".

It will be interesting as I push out more of my modules over the next year to see if people like my modules as much as I do. Hehe.