Reply To: Native Instruments: 2025 Summer of Sound Sale – LOWEST PRICE THREAD

[Peter DeLegge]

By the way, before I made the above post, I checked a bunch of online shops that resell Native Instruments software, including Plugin Boutique, JRR Shop, Sweetwater, Musicians Friend…Best Service’s prices are the lowest, even when using JRRShop’s discount code, and not even factoring in if you use Best Coin — or the value of getting Best Coin on the purchase.

SIDE NOTE ON MSD PRICE COMPARISON SITE
I ran a check at MSD, which has been getting progressively worse at price comparisons, as they’ve pulled out a lot of the stores from their price comparisons on products / plugins. I forgot which shop, but I think it’s owned by the same guy who owns or owned VSTBuzz. Affiliate marketing price comparison sites are one of the most popular category of solopreneur sites in the last ten years. It’s been a money maker for thos who can attract high volume. (Yes, we have tons of content here, but because we have a small community, the affiliate links don’t even bring in enough to come close to paying for a fraction of the costs of running this site). MSD has been pulling out shops from price comparisons. The result is that they’re no longer a very useful site.

Here’s what I believe is what’s going on there. Different stores pay different commission rates to site owners. The smaller shops — or even big shops that are aggresively attempting to grow their market share — tend to pay HIGHER commission rates than the established players in order to bring in more sales. In the current case, where I was price checking Komplete versions, it only showed me prices for Gear4Music — a shop I’ve never heard of — and Sweetwater. I did more searches and found that they still had Plugin Boutique and PluginFox, but the site has become a mess and the price histories we’re there and unified for the various stores. I was contemplating adding a price comparison and price history function here, and even paid for some tools already, but I’ve put that on pause.

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