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The original was posted on /r/audioproductiondeals by /u/Batwaffel on 2024-08-26 16:18:47+00:00.

From Gearspace:

Hi all,

This thread and the sale / promotion that the OP mentioned was just shared with me by a friend. Since many of you are friends and supporters of LTL I thought I should drop by and share my feelings and thoughts about this.

To be completely honest this super low price surprised me. I was not aware of this promotion until this morning. As Darren mentioned, yeah we did work really hard on this plugin for well over a year. It was probably the most challenging product development I’ve been involved with to date especially since the hardware set a benchmark we needed to match. As I’m sure many of you would agree, it’s disheartening to see your hard work devalued. And frustrating when it’s a challenge to at least coordinate and synchronize for consistency.

Let’s talk about pricing. I’m going to be completely transparent with you all since I respect you guys. As you may know, I personally believe in setting fair prices for my products that give the customer a lot of value and bang-for-buck. This is one of the big reasons I’ve never had dealers and have only sold my products direct…so I can keep the costs low for you all. In an ideal world I’d love to sell the Silver Bullet mk2 plugin for somewhere between $99 and $149 and rarely have a sale on it. However, that’s not exactly how the Plugin Alliance business model works. I signed a contract with Plugin Alliance to distribute (market/sell) both Chop Shop EQ and any future Silver Bullet plugins back in 2018. At that time PA was only selling perpetual licenses and they didn’t have the subscription model. That came later. I talked to some of the other brands that were on the roster at the time and they were seeing good results from PA despite the less conventional sales model that I might not choose for myself. So I took a chance. Since 2018 many things have changed.

Here’s why the plugin is listed at $350 and why I fought for it to be as high as possible. From my perspective it has little to do with thinking people will pay more for it initially (although I truly believe this plugin is actually worth the $350…I’m very proud of it sonically). It has to do with the way profits are shared on the subscriptions…at least from my perspective as a business owner trying to make a profit. I think the unspoken part is that everyone assumes there will be a sale or voucher at some point that will bring the price down. There are hundreds of plugins in the subscription bundles. Currently the way that the profit share is calculated is based on old-school piece of the pie math. If I have more pieces of pie at greater value, then I get a bigger check when royalties are calculated even if the price is discounted. This simplistic royalty calculation incentivizes me to fight for the highest list price I can. It even incentivizes me to create as many plugins as I can for the bundle. If Brainworx has 80 plugins in the bundle and Louder Than Liftoff only has 2 then you can imagine how small my piece of the pie might be. In the future I’d love to see royalties calculated based on a customer usage model somehow.

Let’s look at how big my piece of the pie was this last quarter. My royalty payout is comprised of two numbers: 1) subscription sales, 2) perpetual license sales. For every sale I make on my own website I get to keep 90% of the profits. For every sale that PA makes on their website I get to keep 60%. Plugin Alliance is handling marketing, sales, customer support, bug tracking, licensing, etc. so their 40% is essentially their fee for providing me those services. Whether or not you think that split is fair is another discussion, but that’s the deal I signed back in 2018. It is what it is.

This last quarter I took home $0.56 on each Chop Shop perpetual license, and $0.0069 on each subscription license. That’s 56 cents and less than 1 cent…you read that right. For Silver Bullet mk2 I took home $7.91 on each perpetual license and $0.0371 on each subscription license. Oh and by the way I have to pay royalties to my developers out of those payouts. So what personally goes in my pocket is less than those numbers.

Now you hopefully see why I wanted to have that list price be as high as possible.

Let’s contrast that with what goes in my pocket when I make a sale on my own website. For the launch of the plugin we had it on sale for $180. I was able to keep $162. Contrast that with $7.91.

If anyone would like to buy this plugin right now, get an equivalent deal, and support the people that worked really hard to create it you may use this discount code on louderthanliftoff.com to get the plugin for $20: SUPPORTCREATORS [edit: just head to the website, no coupon needed]

Thanks for listening and supporting the mission, Brad