Can someone give me a reasonable explanation of why authors are giving codecanyon 30% + $5 of all their profits? If you sell a plugin for $21 they are making more the you! So what is worth over half of your profits? Not to mention it’s even more if you don’t sell exclusively on codecanyon.
First of all, welcome to our community! We are really glad to welcome new members, I can assure you that we are trying our best to help everyone here! 
I know at a first glance the rates might seem high, but what this platform mainly gives you is the EXPOSURE. Envato Market has a lot of buyers, it would take you years to get the same exposure on a private website, outside the Envato Market.
I am here as an (happy) author since 2013. Something else that Envato gives you for these rates is the STABILITY. On 15th day of each month, Envato sends you the money you earned on the platform, without any delay. I think this is very important.
I discovered Envato Market in 2013, when I had a hard time after leaving the company I worked for, to dedicate my time to my 3 years daughter. Since then, I am more than happy to be part of this community.
I know, the rates might seem high in the beginning - and the final income low. But if you work hard enough, you can have a great portfolio, like many Elite Authors have here, on the market. They are earning enough to support their families, to live a decent life. I think this is a great opportunity for a digital life, nowadays.
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It just makes me wonder what their intentions are with rates like this. Doesn’t seem like they’re using the money to make the website any better. I still have to upload all my files through FTP. And raising the fees to 50% for people who don’t sell exclusively on codecanyon is a pretty aggressive business strategy. I’m pretty sure some countries would consider something like that illegal. I wouldn’t mind if the money was going into research or something for the greater good, but these guys just seem greedy.
While I agree the rates do seem high I think there is also a fair amount of other factors worth considering
- if you look at the leading competitor markets (which work using the same business model) they talk about ‘keeping 50 -70%’ which is not a huge difference, yet their customer base, reach and investment in infrastructure is not close to envato’s
Based on other threads in these forums, and in no way aimed at you, there is sometimes a degree of naivety around what is involved in running an organisation the size of envato.
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there is a huge resource and technical investment to maintain such a big and diverse marketplace handling this volume of payments
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envato do commit a lot to testing, however in such a broad marketplace this is unlikely to always have immediate impact.
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realistically making any concrete updates or changes to how things work will require huge legal, staff and technical investment.
As @hevada said it’s a bit of a trade off, and while I agree completely that there is room for improvement in many areas, I dont think envato are ignorant to this, just that we have to be sympathetic to what goes on behind the scenes too.
Both Apple and Google “charge” the same 30% for their services too. Envato has a lot of costs and as a business has to make money. The money you pay them pays for the servers to host your files, the staff to check your files and the support staff to answer your tickets. All of these people need paying. These staff do a lot of research and work on cool new upgrades but most you won’t see in the frontend and for stuff you will want to see, because of the scale of the sites, they won’t be rushed out and only go live with a lot of testing e.g. author pricing is one example.
Envato has a lot to lose if an upgrade breaks their sites for even 45 minutes so they won’t be on the cutting edge of technology, such as still using an ftp uploader (they do have a browser version but has restrictions on file sizes etc). In the near future I would like to see them move to a git based system so as a customer I can see older versions of the theme or plugin but in reality that would be a long way off.
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