If you’re a developer interested in earning some passive income for blocks of code, or if you’re a dev who’d like to save time by buying someone else’s code, we’ve got an interesting proposition for you.
Binpress is a new site that hopes to act as a marketplace for source code. Its goal is to bring web developers “high-quality and high-level source-code solutions for development projects and web ventures,” and it promises that all code sold is “mature and tested,” a promise that’s fulfilled in the company’s developer screening and selection process.
You can go buy — or sell — a JavaScript image manager or an auction system coded in PHP, the little code packages that might make your projects a little bit less of a headache and your work process a little bit faster.
For example, if you’re working on an e-commerce app, you can buy this Paypal API abstraction class for Express Checkout and Direct Payment features. It’s written in PHP, and you can buy a single-site license for $25; a multi-site license will run you $200.
And once you buy a code package, you will receive all future updates and fixes of that code. You’ll have the opportunity to contact the developer if you need to, and you also get a money-back guarantee.
On top of all that function, we have to admit that the form is pretty nice, too:
Binpress seems like a lot less effort for everyone involved than “rent-a-coder”-type outsourcing or contracting solutions, and it generally costs less, as well. Some code is even free, and with many packages, you can see a demo of the code in action before you buy.
In addition to single-language, stand-alone components, Binpress also offers code packages for web frameworks such as CakePHP and Django and platforms such as WordPress and Joomla.
Binpress is a fairly new initiative, and its marketplace offerings are slender so far. So to kick things off and incentivize devs to sell their code on the site, the company is running a programming contest with more than $40,000 in cash and prizes for winners. The contest’s sponsors include Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Amazon Web Services, Conduit, O’Reilly, Tropo, Media Temple, uTest and others.
Although the idea of a “code marketplace” is hardly new, it’s timed well for the current development market. We saw a lot of similar ideas floating around in the early 2000s; however, web development and the dev ecosystem and communities have changed significantly since then. It’s long been time for a new, better way to buy and sell code packages and snippets, and Binpress is a good-looking, functional site that meets the need. If enough devs flesh out its code package inventory, we can see the site being of great use to developers, both those who buy and those who sell.
Binpress comes from Lionite, an Israeli web dev shop with a focus on great design.
In the comments, please let us know if Binpress is the kind of resource you’d use, either as a buyer or seller, and why or why not.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jgroup
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