How I made 32€ with BetterEdit
Posted by HJfod on 13/09/2023
One of the most special aspects of BetterEdit is that it is free: even though it's probably the second most popular mod after Mega Hack and definitely the second most popular mod of that scale, it has always been 100% free for download for everyone - no strings attached. It has been this way from the start, and given that the mod is open source, it realistically will be that way forever.
This is absolutely awesome, and also the single biggest financial mistake of my life.
To give a bit of context, I am a 20-year old student living in Finland in my first year of computer science, currently fulfilling civil service. I still live with my parents, however I very much would like to move out by the end of the year. Which means that I'm going to need a lot of money to, y'know, afford living. While my monetary situation isn't terrible (I've made a fair bit from my YouTube channel), it's also not great. I'm probably going to have to find work very quickly once my civil service ends.
So it doesn't help to realize that, as a rough estimate, I spent probably somewhere around 2000+ hours to code something that I then gave out for free.
Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful or bitter. The amount of thank yous I have received for making BetterEdit is honestly something I am incredibly happy about. It is genuinely really awesome to just see people enjoy the mod, and I don't regret making it one bit, and also I don't regret having it be free. However, I do regret not monetizing it in any way.
Why BetterEdit is free
From the moment I began modding GD, I dreamed of one day making a mod that improves the GD editor - and I also decided from day one that it would be free. Some of you may not know this since it's been a while, but I used to be a fairly popular creator, having made a nïche rated solo extreme demon as well as a bunch of somewhat famous megacollab parts. As such, I became intimately aware of all of the shortcomings of the GD editor, and when I started modding the game, I wanted to fix those shortcomings and make the editor more like what I wanted it to be when I was a creator.
However, there was one thing I knew: if a mod like BetterEdit had come out in 2019 and been paid, I wouldn't have been able to get it. I didn't have online bank details at the time, so any purchase made on the internet would have to go through my father, and he definitely wouldn't have let me buy a silly mod for a silly video game. The GD editor was a very important creative outlet for me at the time - the game was all I ever played - and missing out on BE would've been such a demotivating drag.
That's why I decided that no matter what, BetterEdit would always be free. Aside from not having online bank details, there are a million other reasons young GD creators might not be able to purchase mods - even if they wanted to and had the money. And I just do not have the heart to lock up something behind a paywall, when I know that something is immensely helpful and that I couldn't have personally bought it when I needed it.
That's why every time someone told me "this mod is so good I would pay for it" and I considered that, I eventually always decided against it. I just couldn't do that. Even though I knew the mod was worth a lot and there were a bunch of people willing to pay for it, I couldn't make the choice to lock it up.
How I considered making money
However, this didn't mean I couldn't make anything from the mod ever. I did have several different plans to start earning money via BE.
I set up a PayPal donation link so that people who wanted to pay for the mod could do so. However, I never advertised my PayPal, because I made it during the early phases of BE 5 being developed, and I felt like I wanted to publicize it alongside BE 5 so my brain would feel like it was justified asking for money. And well, we know how BE 5 turned out.
I also planned several times on making a paid BetterEdit Pro version that would have some extra features. However, I could never decide what those extra features were going to be, because any feature you put behind a paywall always raises the question "Would 2019 HJfod have needed this?". If you put too many features behind a paywall, then the free version becomes useless. But if the free version is already incredibly powerful, the paid version becomes less useful, and I don't want to make people feel like they didn't get their money's worth. Managing both a paid and free version simultaniously is a delicate art, and one that I'm not very good at.
However, I did have a plan to solve this issue: live collabing. A feature that would require servers - something that costs money. In other words, a feature that can very easily be made paid and have that be justified. On top of that, the people who would most benefit from that feature - megacollab hosts - are usually the people who can pay for mods. All in all, this plan was perfect: BetterEdit 5 would be free, and it would have a paid live collabing addition.
Unfortunately, I just sat on my ass until Alk finally made a live collabing mod instead.
Now, for the record, I do not at all mean to cast shade on Alk. She was entirely in her rights to make EditorCollab and I have fully supported her on it from the start (I even helped her with some of the UI for the mod). I had a good two year headstart on making a live collabing mod, but I never managed to do it. It's entirely fair that someone else would eventually do it if I take way too long. I obviously don't own the idea of live collabing - heck, I don't own the idea of making the editor better! If someone made a competing mod to BE, that would be completely okay with me.
However, this did trump my plans for how to make BE paid, and admittedly it did cause me to have a bit of a crisis, since it invalidated the very clear roadmap I had planned: first Geode, then BetterEdit for that, then live collabing for that. However, after a long time of throwing ideas around, I eventually decided that I could still do a paid BE Pro anyway, just with a different featureset - still geared towards "professional" creators, as in megacollab hosts, people on the creator leaderboards, streamers, etc.. Essentially, people who could pay.
But uhhh
Well, uh, if you've read my last blog post, you would know that BE Pro didn't end up happening. I did start working on it and I had a lot of plans for it, but if BE isn't happening, a paid Pro version sure as hell isn't either.
And as a result, after all these years, after so many hours spent working on BetterEdit, then working even more on Geode to get a new engine for BetterEdit, then working many hours more on BetterEdit 5, I've made a grand total of around 32€ from the mod through PayPal donations. Which is enough to buy probably a week or two worth of groceries. That's better than nothing I guess.
To reiterate, despite what this post feels like, I do not want to sound ungrateful or that I regret making BetterEdit free. I still think that the principle I abided by - that if I couldn't have paid for it, then I can't expect others to do so - was right. BetterEdit has helped a lot of people in more ways than one. It was one of the flagship projects that pushed the modding revolution of 2021. I couldn't be more happy about what I have managed to do, and idealistically speaking, I still fully agree that I did the right thing. It's just that idealistic beliefs don't put food on my table.
Well, at least there's one thing I got from BetterEdit, which is an awesome mark on my resume. I mean, solid proof that I have over 2 years of what is essentially professional C++ experience, with full-stack UI/UX development, low level memory management and declarative algorithm usage? Hell yeah!
That's it for this post. Moral of the story: if you're good at something, never do it for free (unless you have a moral principle against doing it for not free in which case do it for free but make sure you get at least some money back for it). Cya ;)
-HJfod