Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace, home to hundreds of extensions for Visual Studio, VS Team Sevices and VS Code, will now offer paid as well as free extensions, the company announced earlier this week.
Software companies will be able to sell their extensions to developers that use the Visual Studio integrated development environment under monthly licenses priced based on the size of the user group.
“While I expect the vast majority of extensions will continue to be free, I expect to see an increasing number of high value, high quality extensions to be paid,” Microsoft Corporate VP Brian Harry wrote in blog post.
The current Visual Studio Marketplace includes such bread-and-butter extensions as C# language support, along with less-popular items. The first two new paid extensions debuted this week: Agile Cards, from Spartez, which allows teams to print out cards with work tasks and add them to a physical board; and Berichthaus’ Time Tracker, which does what its name indicates.
VS users will be able to preview paid extensions for 30 days at no cost, after which they will have to pay for a license.