A river dries up.
Digital River - 30%+ and months-long withholding periods
Brief history of Digital River
In the past, there were many Shareware try-before-you buy EXEs and Windows apps. There were BBSs and older gopher (predating WWW) where you could download files over modem. It was costly if you had to make long-distance calls (eg UK to Germany BBS).
Later, many BBS sites operate CD delivery services of their files - FIDO, SWAG, TUCOWS
The problem was - paying the Shareware vendors and getting floppy discs, CDs and registration codes to activate their Shareware. There were many sites - SWREG, KAGI, SHAREIT, and so on.
When someone gets your credit-card number and CCV, you cannot dispute the charges. A notable example of credit-card abuse, was, by Columbusoft that often double their customers. Quite an irony, as Columbusoft sells Accounting for Delphi.
Many rivers flows into one
As time passed, the shareware space consolidated - mergers, buy-overs and site closures.
Many Delphi vendors use Digital River to process funds. Digital River become large by taking over all the Shareware payment processors and merging, closing-down, or laying-off the former Shareware payment sites.
Sites like ShareIT, SWREG, and many small-time credit-card on-line processors got gobbled-up by Digital River.
Digital River “DR” strike a 30%+ deal, meaning, Digital River gets more than 30% revenues, shafting both shareware author and customers with high exchange-rate fees, sometimes double of current equivalent exchange rates.
New Competitors
DR is a merchant of record - they have a license system used by Adobe, Sony, Woo Commerce, a dispute system and call-center to handle disputes.
New competitors - such as Stripe, Paddle, use web-based chat-only, helpdesks (to ditch the call-center) and providing private discreet legal services to sue pirate sites of their biggest customers, instead of suing customers1.
In the grapevine, the present and former CEOs and VPs of DR are the highest paid executives in North Carolina, fueled by the excessive commissions and ridiculous fund withholding times.
New competitors would settle and provide funds withing days, and do the above. Either Delphi vendors are living inside a cave, or, naive enough to use DR.
On 2024 July, DR started minimum thresholds - US$10,000 minimum, and 6-months+, and even 1 year+ withholding - angering many vendors and triggering many complaints.
Would you use Digital River?
Several vendors had pirate sites removed when their payment processor’s legal dept sent DMCA notices to many sites.