Hi everyone
Awesome discussion here. There could not be a better moment to have these topics being discussed.
Keep up. We’re following 
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A “voucher” is indeed an interesting idea. That would rely on the MOD Gbr to pay out that money to commercial plugin devs. Although I suppose that is feasible for e.g. limited time offers (“buy now get the MOD + $N worth of plugins”).
As for donations when paying above the minimum set amount: “Surplus goes equally to all plugin devs” certainly ties in with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_what_you_want “charitable cause”. So that’s a good idea. You might even encourage that: “pay more than average, get a swag bag of MOD merchandise” or something.
There are payment processors who can handle that, hard to say though what is feasible, still brainstorming can’t hurt.
PS. was there a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale of the MOD?
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One thing to consider is that many (maybe even most) in the store currently weren’t really ported to MOD by their authors. Some are ports from ladspa or even ports of ports (of ports!). It can get a bit messy with money involved unfortunately. This is where handling open/free differently than paid plugins might be nicer. Still, if its an open platform that allows anyone to put their plugins in the store, then I think most of these things will handle themselves. There is work done in preparing the plugin for mod which deserves compensation and hopefully they can pay it forward where due.
Without a pay what you want scheme, its tempting to have a free version of plugins and an identical “donation” version, which is kind of a hack and clutters the store. I see this in android occasionally.
I find this whole financial thing surprisingly complex with an astonishing amount of partly contradictory goals. We want to:
- Give users many plugins and choice…
- … but not too many, to avoid overwhelming them
- … so only the best plugins ought to be in the store which is
- unfortunately impossible to objectively evaluate and
- requires countless developer-hours to create
- which could be alleviated if developers could earn money with their plugins
- if they want and not if they not want
- but one needs to be careful not to overcharge the users
- and we must employ an internationally accepted payment system
- but preferably not Paypal because they block(ed) donations for Wikileaks and do other unethical stuff
- Ideally all of this should work without putting down developers who publish their work for free
- and even attracting more devs to the platform
- which brings packaging and compiling to the table, both of which should be simple and smooth
- but maybe not extremely smooth, otherwise we might see too many low-quality or copy-cat plugins
- and even if it’s smooth, packaging/compiling requires effort and should be honored, too
- which is why some share of the income should be distributed to whoever packages plugins
- and all of the above should be reflected in the price,
- plus have tags or be pre-filtered for gratis+free, gratis+proprietary, commercial+proprietary, commercial+free versions
- but (important!) without complicated explanations for the users or cluttering the store,
- but still keeping the hardware affordable
- yet not too cheap because there are stakeholders involved who want their share of the cake
- and ensures that the MOD employees can keep doing their job.
- Bonus: All of this without creating unplanned incentives for any group.
Is this possible to do well? @gianfranco: do you have a (personal) time frame for leaving our untouched paradise where milk and honey flow and LV2 plugins roam the great plains freely?
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I don’t mind having “too many” 
Maybe just a rating system for the users ?
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The only problem with relying on a rating system is that they tend to get biased to the ones best marketed, or simply most popular even though something else is better.
Its a difficult thing to create a good marketplace IMO. But maybe the best option is a curated collection by MOD (perhaps these would be all free, basically the current collection), and then an open marketplace where anybody can upload anything.
One complication I realized with purchased plugins is: what about pedalboard sharing? Would you still be able to try a pedalboard with purchased plugins? Would you need to buy all the plugins first? I suppose this could be worked around if MOD has internally its own mechanism for DEMO plugins (cut sound after 5 minutes or something), rather than each dev implementing their own methods. This way any pedalboard could be shared and any “for sale only” plugins would automatically convert to demo mode.
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Yes, that is the plan. Apart from sharing pedalboards, a pre-installed plugin (directly available for evaluation) is closer to a sale, compared to the user going off somewhere looking for it first
And yes, there is a common mechanism for Demos in the current licensing API: Periodically inject white noise. Just cutting the sound after X minutes has a few problem: Silence will trigger “huh, this thing does not work” questions and without noise, there’d have to be a smooth fade (the MOD does not know how to do that, see the discussion on click-free bypass).
My opinion, too. But I wonder if this is a problem in our case: taste and everything related is highly subjective, so one plug-in cannot be “better” than another. Some plug-ins even forcefully destroy the signal (bitcrushers + distortion) and people love it. Well, I do. 
Full ACK! Make it as simple as possible for the user.