Developing skills for income?

Hi, Im fairly new to Mycroft and like the privacy compared to the alternatives (where they are banned in my household). I have Mycroft running on a Pi3 and started to experiment with developing a skill controlling Plex. I am a software engineer and am interested in developing skills that would be widely used by the community. I searched in the forum for developing skills for income but I didn’t see anything so I’m assuming there isn’t a path for that? Can anyone clarify if there is income earning potential for developing skills?

Thanks

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Hey Tom, welcome to the Forums!

I see two broad ways for Skill devs to monetize their work.

.1. Currently we get requests for contract work where someone would like a custom Skill built for their project or enterprise. We are very focused on the deployment of the Mark II so mostly refer these on to development partners instead. If you’re interested in joining as a development partner, please drop me a line at kris.gesling @ our domain.

.2. Longer term, we want to create mechanisms for all Skill developers to benefit from their contributions. There are a few ways this could look and each I think have their pro’s and cons. It might be that we go a classic app store route - where authors can opt to have their Skill cost some amount of money. They may also choose to have this as a “pay-as-you-feel” option.

An alternative might be having a single premium tier payment so end-users only have to pay a single known fee and can then access whatever they like within that. We would then need to determine a fair way to distribute revenue to authors within that - whether that’s number of installs, amount of usage, or based on reviews. However each of these comes with their own pro’s and con’s and could incentivize authors to craft their experience to maximise revenue over improving the experience for the user. So we’d want to carefully consider what this looked like. For example, if it was based on usage - you could make your Skill intentionally take more steps to get to the desired outcome. This could increase your “usage” stats and thus increase your share of revenue, however it would be a worse experience for the end-user. In the end we need to try and align the motivations of the user with the motivations of developers.

Thanks for the info Kris, much appreciated! I’m currently not necessarily looking to do dev work for other projects. I was thinking more of the app store route or even the alternative you suggested would be interesting. Having that capability would definitely be a boom for capabilities for the device and software and create some great opportunities for developers. All the points with pros/cons you made make sense. Thanks again!
Tom

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