Technically speaking, Blender’s Extensions system already supports distribution and updates through self-hosted repositories. That said, it is not a replacement for things like payments or license management.
It also appears to support authenticated repositories via access tokens, so private or token-gated distribution is technically possible as well. But payments, account management, purchaser verification, and licensing would still need to be handled separately.
Right, it’s not a replacement for those things yet. But that’s the point. Payments and license management are solvable engineering problems. Stripe integration, a creator dashboard, license key generation, none of this is novel. Every other open source ecosystem has figured it out in some form. WordPress has it, VS Code has it. Those might be bad examples. The hard parts are already done: the extension format, the repository system, the in-app update delivery, the review infrastructure, the community trust. Those took years to build. Bolting a payment layer onto that is comparatively straightforward. If the middleman marketplace model is collapsing, FlippedNormals gone, Superhive in crisis, someone is going to have to build this anyway. The question is whether it’s the Foundation doing it intentionally and well, or whether it happens organically through a patchwork of Gumroad links and GitHub repos. Which is already what’s starting to happen right now.
Even if distributed delivery is technically possible, I still think beginners ultimately need some kind of “newspaper” — a place that helps them see what exists, what can be trusted, and where to start.
The real question, then, is whether that “newspaper” still needs to be a middleman marketplace of the current kind, or whether a lighter layer focused on indexing, trust, and discovery would be enough.
In other words: what kind of marketplace, if any, do you think is actually needed?
You could be right, although Stripe does offer MoR services, I don’t know how Superhive set it up. I’m guessing Superhive is the MoR here, I’d be curious to know how they set it up.
What I am looking for is not a system designed merely to prolong what already exists, but a structure that can actually grow.
Not one that just keeps circulating the burden within the same community, but one that can also create room for new value and new participants.
Discovery and trust are real problems, but you don’t need a middleman marketplace to solve them. Look at how VS Code handles extensions. Searchable index, ratings, reviews, install counts, compatibility info. Helps people find what they need and trust what they’re installing. Microsoft isn’t sitting between the developer and the user extracting recurring revenue. The value is in the curation and discovery, not in controlling the transaction.
The Blender Extensions Platform already does most of this for free addons. Search, categories, ratings, compatibility tags, one-click install from inside Blender. It just doesn’t handle payments yet. And that’s a way thinner layer than what Superhive provides. You don’t need $160K/month in overhead to process a Stripe transaction and host a product page.
What actually grows the ecosystem rather than just recirculating money within it? I think that’s the real thing here. A Foundation-backed marketplace with in-app discovery lowers the barrier for everyone. Right now getting onto Superhive means navigating their submission process, paying their fees, accepting their commission, and potentially now their support period mandate. A lightweight system where creators publish on their own terms and are discoverable directly inside Blender would bring in people who never would have bothered with Superhive’s overhead. The “newspaper” you’re describing could literally just be a curated front page on extensions.blender.org. Staff picks, trending, new releases, compatibility verified for latest Blender. Community reviews and ratings. Curation and trust without being a middleman. The marketplace this community actually needs is one that’s barely a marketplace at all. Discovery layer, payment processor, update delivery. Everything else is overhead that this whole thing is proving the ecosystem can’t sustain.
edit: It’s just an idea I’ve been thinking of for the past few years, I think it would make things way simpler especially for paid addon updates, would love it if everything updated through that, potential way to provide money directly to the Blender dev fund, etc.
Somehow I feel like Blender Foundation would be very opposed to creating a platform for paid addons. there’s already a bit of friction over the idea of selling GPL software.
The Foundation’s own position is that selling GPL software is fine. You’re selling the download service, not the code. The GPL doesn’t change. Customers still get full rights once they have it.
The real concern is whether the Foundation wants the operational burden of payment processing, disputes, and refunds. That’s fair. But they’re already dealing with the consequences of not having it. The addon ecosystem is fragmenting, the largest marketplace is in crisis, and creators are scattered across five different platforms with no consistency for users. They’re exposed to this mess whether they run a marketplace or not.
It wouldn’t need to be a full marketplace. Stripe integration, a creator dashboard, and a price field on extensions they already host. The discovery and delivery infrastructure already exists. The question is whether adding a payment button is worth it to give the community a trustworthy alternative before this gets worse.
I like the idea, but I think you are underestimating the cost of curation.
Take a look at this and imagine how much review work is involved there. Imagine the cost of approval, rule enforcement, and visibility design:
First, a “public square” does not function as a public square just by existing. In the case of VS Code, that works on top of Microsoft’s enormous platform capacity and developer base.
Second, I think this reduces Superhive’s value too much to just payments + fees. Superhive also handles creator review, product review, product page operations, discovery flow, sales flow, and in some cases even editorial or campaign work.
The bigger point here I’m trying to make is that if Superhive’s model is no longer sustainable, and their own numbers suggest it isn’t, then this fragmentation is happening regardless of what anyone thinks about what I’m proposing. Creators are already moving to Gumroad. FlippedNormals already shut down. Curtis Holt is publicly doing the math on which storefront to drop. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway. So the question isn’t whether the current model survives. It’s what replaces it. Either someone builds a coherent alternative, or the ecosystem fragments across Gumroad, GitHub, Patreon, individual websites, and whatever else people land on. That fragmentation is worse for everyone. Harder for users to find things, harder for creators to reach an audience, no consistency, no trust layer. That’s why I keep coming back to the Foundation. Not because it’s the only option, but because it’s the only entity positioned to prevent fragmentation by giving the community a single trustworthy place to land. If not them, then who? Because the status quo might not be an option anymore.
edit: Gumroad doesn’t have this problem because Gumroad never tried to be what Superhive is. Flat 10% fee, no curation, no editorial, no support period mandates. They’re a payment processor and a download link. Gumroad also doesn’t solve discovery or trust. There’s no “is this compatible with my Blender version” verification, no browsing, no curation. Users find products through external links or they don’t find them at all. That’s exactly the gap. Gumroad handles payments but not discovery. The extensions platform handles discovery but not payments. The community needs both in one place, and right now nobody is providing that.
Maybe Gumroad is sufficient and I’m just overthinking all of this?
I agree with much of your diagnosis and framing here.
What still feels like a step too far to me is the move from that diagnosis to “therefore the Blender Foundation should take this on.” Being a trusted entity is not the same thing as being the entity that can or should handle commerce, payments, authentication, visibility, review, and rule enforcement.
I’d also be interested in how Superhive itself sees this question, and of course the Blender Foundation as well.
As for me, I think I’d rather let this sit for a while and think it through further.
Sorry I wasn’t trying to say it’s literally 1:1, there are people that buy that don’t sell, I was trying to think of the whole picture. This is a niche creative tool ecosystem. The point isn’t that every customer is a seller. It’s that the community is small and interconnected enough that you can’t squeeze one side without the other feeling it. And the customers who aren’t creators, the hobbyists and the impulse buyers who grabbed something on sale and used it twice, I think those are the people least likely to pay 50% annual renewals but maybe I’m wrong.
All I know is, if Superhive doesn’t come up with a better approach to this, I’m done buying there and I’m done selling there. I’m already set up on Gumroad which I imagine others are as well. And honestly, I already fix and improve addons I’ve bought when they break or when I need something from them. It would be great if more addons had an easy way to contribute improvements back, because some of the fixes and features I’ve built for my own use could benefit everyone. I have reached out to addon creators and given them my improvements. PR’s would be way better though I think.
As @MACHIN3 pointed out with the MoR, you also need someone to take on the legal liabilities, which is what Superhive does. Otherwise you would have to do it yourself, or outsource it to some other company the way you outsource it to Superhive now. You’re just saying Blender Foundation should become the merchant instead of Superhive.
Also Superhive is the biggest market for Blender, as far as I can tell.
And I’m also not sure where you got the idea that creators and users are all the same and this is all self-circulating, that doesn’t seem right, what is your evidence?
I think this market follows the 1% rule like every other market, as in 1% of people are creators.
I think it is a mistake to treat Blender users as mere “consumers” circulating money within the community itself. Many of them are connected to markets outside of it through the work and services they produce — and frankly, they should be.
I want the people who use my add-on to achieve better outcomes, not just to keep money moving inside a closed ecosystem.
So I think the scope of the question needs to widen. Instead of asking only how the Blender community sustains itself internally, we should also be asking how it grows outward into the wider world. That is the level at which a genuinely new platform model might start to become visible.
Gumroad, Paddle, LemonSqueezy all do MoR-as-a-service. Or creators can run their own payment processing if they want, that’s what Gumroad already is and how VS Code marketplace plugin writers do it. All you’d really need is a payment integration and terms of service. The complexity is a reason to use existing infrastructure, not a reason it can’t be done.
Pluglug’s comment here nails it better than I did. Blender users aren’t just circulating money internally, they’re connected to outside markets through the work they produce.
I’ve been pushing hard on the Foundation marketplace idea but honestly, maybe it doesn’t need to be any single entity. The pieces already exist, extensions.blender.org for discovery or something else altogether, Gumroad and Stripe for payments, GitHub for collaboration. Maybe what’s needed is just better bridges between them, not another middleman. Either way, I think the community will figure it out. It always does. I appreciate everyone engaging with this, it’s given me some new creative ideas.
edit: changed Stripe to Gumroad. Wasn’t sure what the status of Stripe was, apparently they bought out LemonSqueezy? Stripe launched “Managed Payments” as a full MoR service apparently.
Well, it has been for years, bittorrent protocol, or old Napster, or even the MS Windows Update system now (if one chooses to let it happen).
None of this is about piracy, it’s about the various systems that have been in place to allow peer to peer and distributed data flow, using the upload capacity of peoples personal Internet connection.
I know it’s an old joke, but Linux ISO’s do get seeded via ‘private’ bittorrent, etc.
In a way that sort of ‘newspaper’ has already been built, it’s the Extensions platform, or more the point, the Extensions platform system, keeping free and paid as separate entities (maybe combined with news sites like Blendernation, this forum, reddit, etc.
We’ve gained some real insight here. What remains is a question of concrete numbers — and that’s a conversation that can’t happen without SH and BF in the room. Someone go wake them up. It’s morning already.
Blender got so strong because paid plugins had more value(pricing as well as time of updates) back then.
Going away from that is imo a mistake.
All this, the newest Superhive announcement and the many implemented and announced anti-customer moves (Enshittifying) will do, is me purchasing less on such a platform. In response to that, keeping the wallet closed works.