Why is the Discord bot market so overpriced?

[ThatTonybo]

Jesus you say this then you say it's overpriced. Don't you think that, maybe, you're contradicting yourself for the sake of insulting LillianA? Yikes dude.

TypeScript was genuinely wondering. Not to mention that if you manage to write yourself a complete wrapper, you won't have major issues with it. Some examples of these wrappers are:

Python: https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py
Java: https://github.com/DV8FromTheWorld/JDA
C#: https://github.com/discord-net/Discord.Net https://github.com/suicvne/DiscordSharp
Ruby: https://github.com/meew0/discordrb
Lua: https://github.com/SinisterRectus/Discordia
JavaScript: https://github.com/discordjs/discord.js/

I didn't really think much while writing there, so honestly I didn't mean to insult anyone, but yeah. Yikes to me. Sorry if that caused any issues there.

And what do mean with the wrappers?

 

[Ally]

I didn't really think much while writing there, so honestly I didn't mean to insult anyone, but yeah. Yikes to me. Sorry if that caused any issues there.

And what do mean with the wrappers?

Wrappers:

The API is a piece of shit to work with, especially when you work with the raw gateway and REST API.

The wrappers make it so much easier to work with the Discord API. The REST API itself isn't terrible either, and there's comprehensive documentation for it and how to handle everything.

The only thing that's really annoying doing yourself is parsing JSON, but that's handled by most languages or libs (JS handles it alone afaik and C# you can use either .NET's one or Newtonsoft.JSON).

 

[ThatTonybo]

Wrappers:

The wrappers make it so much easier to work with the Discord API. The REST API itself isn't terrible either, and there's comprehensive documentation for it and how to handle everything.

The only thing that's really annoying doing yourself is parsing JSON, but that's handled by most languages or libs (JS handles it alone afaik and C# you can use either .NET's one or Newtonsoft.JSON).

Gotcha. I made my own wrapper and the only hate I have on the API now is how unforgiving the gateway is, but good point there.

 

[Sentiinel]

CBA to read the whole thread but Discord bots are usually pretty cheap, $20 for a full-featured bot isn't much.

 

[jayt387]

Ngl

 

[LillianA]

If you think bots are too expensive, go grab the Discord developers documentation and learn how to make them yourself.

The market surrounding them is overpriced, and I agree, but it'll calm down after a while. You're still getting many first time programmers joining into the pool, most of which are just copying the examples off discord.js or something and calling themselves a developer, and then they go ahead, apply, join teams, make premade resources and sell them, which is where the "overpricing" is coming from.

I've been making bots for over 2 years now, and the amount of changes I've seen, including the amount of people starting to make bots, the more and more inexperienced ones, and the prices going up, it's kinda scary, but you have to expect it.

My post is a bit rough, but I'm basically saying this: don't complain if you don't know the top-end of it. Honestly, when you get past the basics and mid-level stuff, bots aren't "easy". The API is a piece of shit to work with, especially when you work with the raw gateway and REST API.

I've been working with discord.js for quite a bit of time now and started using TypeScript instead of JavaScript because my code is cleaner, easier to read and better. (an advantage of TypeScript instead of JavaScript would be compile-time errors instead of runtime) So yeah I do know what I'm doing with it, I'm also not talking about non-premade bots are there are a few people (not exactly a lot) that have decent prices. This post was mainly targeted at pre-made bots in the resources.

One bot (quite a few purchases) in the resources section (not naming) is ~$6-7 (something like that) and features;

Every config file (and data file) being in the root folder of the bot (what a bigbrain thing to do!)
JSON File Storage!
Dogshit code!
Boilerplate code! (from anidiotsguide to be specific)
And a lot of the commands are tutorial-based.

I don't know if its just me but to be completely honest with you if I released a bot at this point I could give it a price-tag of $20 and get away with it because of the code quality and features it offers yet it wouldn't take me $20/copy's worth of time/complexity to do.

 

[ThatTonybo]

I've been working with discord.js for quite a bit of time now and started using TypeScript instead of JavaScript because my code is cleaner, easier to read and better. (an advantage of TypeScript instead of JavaScript would be compile-time errors instead of runtime) So yeah I do know what I'm doing with it, I'm also not talking about non-premade bots are there are a few people (not exactly a lot) that have decent prices. This post was mainly targeted at pre-made bots in the resources.

One bot (quite a few purchases) in the resources section (not naming) is ~$6-7 (something like that) and features;

Every config file (and data file) being in the root folder of the bot (what a bigbrain thing to do!)
JSON File Storage!
Dogshit code!
Boilerplate code! (from anidiotsguide to be specific)
And a lot of the commands are tutorial-based.

I don't know if its just me but to be completely honest with you if I released a bot at this point I could give it a price-tag of $20 and get away with it because of the code quality and features it offers yet it wouldn't take me $20/copy's worth of time/complexity to do.

Yeah, premades are defiantly overpriced for what they are, and I get what the post is aimed at now.

 

[tiehm]

I could not possibly agree more, I've had quite a few decent discord bot ideas but there's no point putting in dozens of hours only to have people say overpriced when I'm selling it for $10. Private projects are even worse, do you seriously expect me to put in 5-10 hours of my time and pay me $15 in return? That's like $2 an hour. I could literally get a job at McDonald's for more than that. This is why you're going to see (and have already seen) less and less quality developers on mcm.

Edit: Also I want to add something that I hate about this market. I've sold dozens of programs on this site and the one thing I can tell you will make people think your program is worth more is a gui. My discord dm bot was originally a console application and people said it was overpriced when I was selling it for $20 but then when I added a gui with zero additionally features suddenly people were okay with paying $75 for the exact same program plus a gui.

That is indeed true. The only way I would return to this general market is with an idea I had where I can provide bots for (after initial work) no effort . With that I could low-ball the whole market easily. I just do not have the time to do this on my own sadly.

 

[LillianA]

I'm closing the thread after this post its old;

The entire point of this post was not for private projects and more of bots people sell as resources, Take CoreBot for example, I've seen the code of CoreBot since one of my friends had purchased it and to say what I think I'm allowed to say--

All of the data is stored in the root project folder (not in a /data subdir)
The code is really random (for example some lines end with semi-colons, some dont??? Eslint isn't hard to setup)
The code quality is overall very poor, the person who wrote it is seriously in-experienced.
Some of the code is straight up ripped from bot tutorials.

To me all of that even with the "features" it has it is not worth its price point, Now if the code wasn't horrible maybe it would be worth that price. I would personally not pay $5 for a pre-made bot with that quality of code.