Plenty of studios make more from reselling other people's software than from building anything. A platform pays twenty per cent of the first year, sometimes more, and all you have to do is recommend it. We do not take that money, and it is worth explaining why rather than treating it as a virtue.
The problem is not the commission. It is the advice.
Once a studio earns on a licence, its recommendation stops being information. Maybe the platform genuinely fits. You cannot tell, and neither, after a while, can they. The question quietly changes from what should this company build to what can we implement, and the answer is always the thing they implemented last time.
If our advice costs you nothing extra, you can take it at face value.
What it costs us
Real money. It also costs us the easy version of the sales conversation, where a logo does the reassuring. We have to say what we would build and why, and be judged on that.
What you get instead
- When we say buy this off the shelf, that is free advice against our own interest — and we do say it.
- When we say build it, the reason is the work, not a partner tier.
- Nothing in your stack is there because it paid to be.
The obvious objection
Does this mean we build everything from scratch? No. We use the same databases, queues, payment processors and model providers everyone else does, and we will tell you when a product does the job better than anything we could write. The difference is that we are not paid to say it.
It is a small policy. It decides more about a project than most of the technical choices that follow it.