Toolgether Offers a Paid-for Widgets Model

Toolgether is one of the companies launching today at the DEMOfall conference. Today is the private beta launch date for the company so we should probably be careful in our assessments of its usefulness and future but so far the future looks bright enough to me.

So Toolgether serves as a marketplace for anyone to find widgets and web applications (called tools here) in one convenient place for future use on a website or a blog. It may sound a lot like Widgetbox or any other widget repository but while Wiedgetbox only allows developers to upload their already available widgets, Toolgether has a very different offer to developers since it provides a web application builder here.

This builder is for developers of desktop apps to transform their software into widgets without numerous hours of development - in a few easy and not very time-consuming steps. Initially the web application builder will only support JAVA-based apps but then further languages are supposed to arrive as well.

Besides, developers are invited to monetize the applications they create using Toolgether’s web app builder with a revenue sharing model so that they are paid when someone installs their application or widget. The source of shared revenue are end users paying for their subscriptions - here every user can either use the applications for free on the site or get embed code for a small fee.

And this is where I see a potential for a problem - there are quite a few repositories for all types of widgets online and the majority of them offer everything they can for free anyway and people will be hesitant to pay the subscription unless they find something absolutely unique and definitely not available anywhere else. And Toolgether will need to motivate web developers into building widgets for this particular marketplace only without making similar widgets available on Widgetbox or Facebook, for example, for potential customers to pay the subscription fee for something they can be sure not to find anywhere else online.

If Toolgether manages to lure many developers in on exclusive conditions, they could very well reach the success but only time will tell how appealing developers consider the marketplace to be - and the key to this will probably be the marketplace ability to reach end users for web application.

Today Toolgether is launching in a private beta so you’ll need a special link to get in - the first 100 readers to use this link to create their accounts will be able to try Toolgether for themselves.