news Unlock has launched 🚀

So why Unlock?

I was working on my first Electron application a while ago and couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Maybe it would enable me to make a living selling my own products, how cool would that be! However, it turned out setting up billing, licensing, and distribution was easier said than done. I could not find a convenient plug & play solution to ship my application. So, I decided to build my own. Along the way, I noticed this problem: selling software, dealing with licensing and distribution wasn’t just a pain for Electron applications; it was a pain for many different technologies. With Unlock I want to help developers and companies make a living online while they can keep doing what they love to do, which is writing code and shipping new features.

Unlock does this by integrating into the existing stack of developers and customers. Push your code to GitHub, and Unlock takes care of billing, licensing, distribution, changelog management, and more. That’s right; you don’t even have to leave your terminal.

Unlock supports NodeJS, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Electron applications. Getting started is extremely easy; you can have your first sale and have it distributed to your customer via a private repository protected with a license key within 5 minutes. Setting this up would typically take you weeks or months.

And that’s not all; Unlock has some really cool features on the roadmap. For example, a marketplace to boost your product sales, so you don’t have to worry about marketing, GitHub sponsor integration, automatic invites to private GitHub repositories, feedback and idea collection from customers, WordPress plugin and theme updater library, and much more.

To help you get started selling online, I’m giving away over 5000 dollars in prizes to celebrate the launch, including a MacBook M1. Be sure to check out the contest page for all the details, but in short, to enter, submit your product to our marketplace. This means you can win prizes while at the same time making a living online!

And by the way, if you are a developer who has always wanted to make a living online selling software but you just don’t know where to start. Reach out to me on Twitter, and I’ll be happy to help.

Thanks for reading along & have a fantastic day. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback.