PLR Software – Buyer Beware
Private Label Rights, or PLR, is one of the quickest ways to create your own product. This is especially true if the PLR item in question is an ebook or report.
The great thing about Private Label Rights is that you are supplied with the original, editable version of the product and you are free to do anything you want with it. The absolute minimum that you could do would be to resell it as is, but that really defeats the point of PLR. It’s advisable to at least change the title and put your own name in as author, but personally, I prefer to rewrite sections of them, add to them, remove out-of-date information etc.
When it comes to software, though, things aren’t as easy. To begin with, you need to be a programmer, or have access to a programmer if you want to make any changes to the software. Furthermore, you also need a copy of the programming language under which it was developed. E.g. Visual Basic, C++, Delphi etc. If you don’t have that, then you will not be able to create a new version of the software with your changes in it.
Even if you are a programmer, or have access to one, and have the relevant programming language available, the problems don’t always stop there as I found out on several occasions.
As a professional programmer, I know how long it can take to develop new software programs. So there have been occasions where I have been offered PLR on some existing software and I have taken up the offer. Knowing that I have the ability to change, enhance, improve or add new features to the software, it’s a very quick way of getting software written. Or so I thought!
On more than one occasion, the original software programmer has used some additional, commercial software libraries to create the software. If you don’t have those libraries, you cannot build new versions of the software. Buying them is an additional expense that you haven’t factored in to the overall costs.
Similarly, other programmers have used free libraries that no longer exist, or don’t work with the latest version of the programming language. In some cases, they can be made to work, but it requires a lot of effort. In other cases, there’s little or nothing you can do short of finding an equivalent library or writinf the software yourself. In many cases I have ended up abandoning the project as I don’t have the time to spend trying to get it to work.
The worst scenario is that the originator of the PLR software doesn’t give you all of the original source code, so there are parts of the software that you simply cannot change. This happened to me on one occasion. The PLR source was not being sold by the originator, but somebody else who had bought the PLR rights and was selling them on. He had no idea that the source code was incomplete and was also uncontactable.
I ended up hacking the executable to make changes (not for the faint-hearted!). It eventually became impossible to make further changes and I had to withdraw my plans to put the product to market.
That was quite a disappointment to say the least as it was a product that I really wanted to sell. I am now in the process of creating a similar product from scratch, which is actually turning out better than the original, but I have effectively lost the time and money that I invested in that PLR product.
So, if you are getting in to the lucrative software market, and using PLR as baselines for some of your own products, ensure that you have all of the source code, as well as the tools and knowledge you need to modify it.
Caveat Emptor – Let The Buyer Beware!
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