Unfortunately, that 25% was not enough to offset the losses and time which our team was spending on the Marketplace. It was operating at a loss when it was at it's peak, I'm afraid, and even more so at 25%.
Think that may be a glass half full type approach to that forum. The other is that, the marketplace generated a lot of required support for these third party items 🙂 . Our team had to facilitate and handle a lot of that and direct them to the right avenue and that also stole support time from our customers.
We also were not very active on our own community for our own software support prior to 2 years ago (don't quote me on timeframe, I'm pre-coffee 😄 ) so a vast majority of individuals were here because they needed marketplace support or wanted to give feedback on our software. Now that we do give support over our community for our software, it will continue to grow the community here as a whole.
We 💗 our third party providers but us facilitating payment and being involved in the Marketplace was simply not working. It may not be a popular decision but ultimately, it was one that had to be made to ensure continued success of our business and be able to focus on more development of the software. This change though does open up possibilities in the free market for third party providers and also allows them to get more revenue, less restrictions, etc... There are a few topics debating and covering a lot of these points more in depth so you may wish to read through those.