Would you buy a web application starting kit?

[eluser]Ollie Rattue[/eluser]
Firstly thanks for all your detailed replies. It is great to get real world feedback and validation of a business idea. The feedback has made me question my assumptions and the developer market in general.

For me in business terms this product makes sense for a bootstrapping developer. I would buy this right now if it existed. I am my market. I freelance (3/4/5 days a week) and build my SAS product whenever possible. Anything that could speed up this process, save me time, and get my MVP to market is worth paying for.

So I guess I am a little surprised at the general response here which seem more orientated towards the developer / hacker mindset than the business side of building a commercial web application. It would be interesting to see the responses from developers in other frameworks communities such as Rails which are perhaps more business / startup orientated.

To be clear this 'starting kit' is aimed at SAS web applications with a monthly payment plan such as BaseCamp and Buffer. The starting kit is the nuts and bolts behind the product, which need to be coded, but don't add unique value (i.e. I don't buy Basecamp because of it's great billing system).

[quote author="toopay" date="1306343727"]But the problem is, each developer needs, is different.[/quote]

I disagree. The reason for making this in the first place is that developers needs for SAS web applications are in fact very similar. The product I am building at the moment (Flaregun) has a lot of identical needs to other SAS web apps such as Buffer (also built on CI). I am quite literally re-inventing the wheel here...

[quote author="phpserver" date="1306352371"]You should worry about what piracy could do to your bottom line. Any developer will almost certainly be interested in looking at your code throughly.If you trust people that much to give them code you wrote for over a month, you may wanna stop reading from here on because it do not make any business sense.[/quote]

Maybe I am being idealistic but for me piracy doesn't seem to occur as readily for small scale products. Expression engine sells their code without encryption etc and runs a business. A 'SAS web app kit' is not going to be put up on bit torrent networks in the same way as Photoshop is. I also envisaged a license system whereby you get access to updates, documentation, support network. So you are buying additional services on top of the code.

[quote author="toopay" date="1306343727"]In the end, i think, the real "web application starting kit" is the framework (including CodeIgniter) itself! ;-)[/quote]

You are missing the point. There is so much functionality which every SAS product requires which is identical. It is why features such as recurring billing are sold as third party services (Charify, spreedly, recurly etc). Clearly CodeIgniter does not provide this.

[quote author="fedeisas" date="1306398693"]I've been watching a similar project this week. It's called CI Bonfire. You should take a look, because it seems promising.[/quote]

Thanks for suggesting this project. I heard about it a while back. I open sourced a similar set of 'get a head start' code for the previous version of CodeIgniter based on my own tweaked layout - https://github.com/ollierattue/codeignit...ting-point

[quote author="fedeisas" date="1306398693"]To be honest, I wouldn't pay for any of this. If I want a User Access Managment, I would use a library (actually, I use IonAuth in most of my projects). You can build a blog module, an image gallery module, but how would they connect each other?[/quote]

This code is slightly different to what you have outlined above. Yeah you are right there are lots of user libraries available. But there is a difference between a user library and ready to roll code which integrates said user library into a recurring monthly billing system with price plans, upgrades, downgrades etc.

[quote author="fedeisas" date="1306398693"]Most apps have unique ways to sell and make different plans. How could you make a system flexible enough for that?[/quote]

I disagree. Most SAS products actually have very similar price plans. A charge per month with a limitation of features or an allowance with perhaps a free plan and trial periods (30 days free before you pay) on the paid plans.

[quote author="fedeisas" date="1306398693"]PD: I'm from a far far away country, Argentina. If my english isn't perfect, I apologize in advance.[/quote]

No need to apologise. I am learning Spanish at the moment. Hopefully I will go Argentina next year

Any other thoughts, suggestions, ideas? I think this is a very interesting discussion. At the end of the day if there turns out to be of no commercial value then I will open source the 'nuts and bolts' code I am currently writing for Flaregun.