I would like to monetize it somehow, because I think it’s a tool that can bring great value to companies, and I would like to generate some passive income from it. My current plan would be to distribute a version with only common integrations, and leave "enterprisey" integrations (Kafka, AWS, xUnit reports…) in a paid version. I still have no idea what a proper system would be (one time fee, company subscription, maybe depending on the size…)
Does anyone have experience regarding monetizing a CLI tool? I have a hard time finding examples of what could or wouldn’t work.
The issue with CLI tools is that they are going to be used by engineers, so you have to offer way more value then what it takes someone to search github for a python script and run it. This is very hard to make.
Whereas if you make something that has an intuitive front end, non technical people can learn to use it, and would pay money for it.
However, it does not only contain a cli tool but also a free PHP module to load these encrypted PHP files as well as other tools.
The licensing is pretty hard to get around, it uses a hardware id registered via online server, so you can't easily use the software on a device without having it properly licensed. Protecting your work will be a high amount of monetizing it.