How selling a plugin on Sonorie works

Building a plugin is half of what people want to do with one. The other half is letting other people use it, and for some, selling it. Sonorie has a marketplace for that, and this is how it works from both sides.

Publishing

From any plugin in the studio, Sell opens the listing: a title, a short description and a price. A plugin can be free, or priced between $5 and $999. The floor is arithmetic: below about $1.75 the card processing on a sale costs more than the commission it comes out of.

The first time, you accept the seller agreement and connect a Stripe account to be paid into. Then the listing goes to review.

Nothing goes on sale before it builds

An approved listing is not on sale yet. It is compiled first, for Windows, macOS and Linux, on the same build machines that produce exports, and it goes live only when the binaries exist. Earlier, approval published a listing while its build was still running, which meant a buyer could pay in that gap and get a download that never arrived. A plugin that cannot be built is not put on sale.

The buyer’s binary is not the seller’s export. It is compiled with the licence check built in, so a purchased plugin asks for its key.

Screenshots are rendered, not drawn

Every listing gets a screenshot rendered from the plugin’s own interface, taken at approval and again for every new version, so the picture cannot drift from what is on sale. Sellers can add their own images as well. Uploads are decoded and re-encoded before they are stored, which removes anything hidden inside them and the location data cameras embed.

What a buyer gets

A download for their operating system, with the VST3, AU, CLAP and LV2 inside, and a licence key. The key activates on three computers at a time. Activating one is a paste: the plugin shows a machine code, the buyer takes it to sonorie.com/activate on any device, phone included, and brings the answer back. That computer then works offline for a year, and is activated again the same way after it. Nothing about playing audio ever waits on the network.

Because the exchange happens on another device, it works for a studio computer that is never connected to the internet. A buyer who replaces a computer deactivates the old one from their account and the seat is free at once.

Buyers always download the newest version. A seller publishes an update from the same dialog, with a version name and a note on what changed, and it is rebuilt and re-photographed the same way as the first.

Money

The seller keeps 80% of the sale price. Sonorie keeps 20% and pays the card processing out of it, so “80%” means 80% of what the buyer paid, not 80% of whatever is left after fees.

Payouts reach the seller’s Stripe account after a holding period: 14 days for a verified seller, 30 before that. The reason is chargebacks. A disputed card payment can arrive weeks after a sale, and the hold is the time in which a problem is usually found while the money has not left.

Store pages and reviews

Every seller has a store page listing what they sell, with their rating across all of it, reached by clicking their name anywhere in the marketplace. Buyers can rate and review what they bought, and only buyers can: a review carries “Verified buyer”, and loses it if the purchase is refunded. Sellers can answer each review publicly.

What a seller can see, and what they cannot

Sellers see how their listings are doing: sales, licences issued, how many are activated, how many devices are live. They do not see who the buyers are, their email addresses or their machines. A buyer’s licence is between the buyer and Sonorie.

What the marketplace is not

It does not sell source code; buyers get compiled plugins. It does not sell AAX, which Sonorie does not build. And it is not a way round the rules for what may be sold: a listing that copies somebody else’s plugin or infringes on someone’s rights is taken down, and there is a form for reporting one.