The gig economy is eating the world. Like any revolution, it has its losers (poor working class of home cleaners, drivers or photographers) and some winners (mainly digital and artistic professions).

Let’s focus on developers.

Working as a freelancer offers them numerous advantages including, higher net salary in some countries, working on several projects simultaneously, or adapt their working hour

But, they still sell their time, per hour or per day. That means, limits in terms of revenues, compared to a successful career in large corporations and the necessity to always keep a high-ratio between billed and non-billed hours.

On the other hand. Writers, singers, painters, and many other artistic professions earn more from selling their creations rather than for their live performance as their career takes off (even if it does not in most of the cases).

Today, there are more and more opportunities for individual talented developers to add new streams of recurring revenues.

The oldest one — is app creation. Creating a more or less successful app may bring-in some cash, for a (short) moment. But competition is now tough and as a consumer-facing product, any app requires either having more than one string to developer’s bow either a gathering a small team.

Modules and extensions of famous digital platforms like Salesforce (AppExchange), Magento, Wordpress or Shopify also work. But it requires extensive knowledge of the platform and related industry understanding (CRM or e-commerce). According to Shopify, average app revenue is $2,000 monthly per app.

Finally, we think that there is a new path for all developers to get some steady revenue from their creation. There is xscode initiative with private Github repositories and…

That’s why we build code.store.

We think that, if we reduce the size of any software to a microservice, isolated and perfectly solving one functional problem, it could become a building block used by many and created by one developer or a small team.

Open-source proved it’s horizontal domination in lower layers of software stacks. Open-source projects, funded by large companies depending on them are led by individuals investing their personal time in those projects for recognition and the beauty of creation.

But as we ride up to end-user solutions (B2C or B2B), open-source projects disappear and are replaced by SAAS editors. That’s why you don’t see any Photoshop or Office open source equivalents.

At code.store, want to try a slightly mixed approach: while reducing the size of the software to small and reusable building blocks, we want to offer full flexibility of open-source projects. By making our microservices billable we want to provide revenues for their maintainers and creators.

We want to provide a platform, where each developer can try to become a small SAAS business owner selling a simple cart service, or an SAP/Adobe connector, or an invoice generator. But in a centralized, standard way, providing their clients’ enterprise-grade guarantees and H24 support (we do that).

What do you think?

https://code.store/