Poncheg.com - State & Community News Blog

Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: It has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn’t stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.

Case in point: Zoho’s Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. This is a way for Zoho users to make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company’s drag-and-drop app development tool.

If you’ve made an app in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee if you want. Zoho doesn’t take a commission from the sale of apps, but if you use Creator (or any other Zoho app) more than its personal-use plan permits, you’ll have to cough up a subscription fee. This goes for app creators as well–if a lot of people are using your apps, you’ll have to pay, too.

Zoho isn’t trying to create a get-rich-quick scheme here. “There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf, but are needed in a particular use case or situation,” an explanation from the company read, “but there is not enough market for vendors to offer such situated software as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business.”

In conjunction with the release of its Marketplace, Zoho also launched Version 3.0 of Creator.