For VS Code extensions: which listing, issue thread or talk brought the licence buyer.

01How they sell

• One-offA perpetual licence for the current major version, with a year of updates and a paid upgrade when the next version ships.
• SubscriptionYearly personal and company licences, the company one often bought by a manager after a developer asks.
• FreemiumA free core with paid features, or a trial period enforced inside the editor that ends in a buy prompt.

02Payments it reads

• PaddleMerchant of record for licences sold to companies in many countries that want a proper invoice; transactions, renewals and refunds as adjustments are read.
• Lemon SqueezyLicence keys issued and validated through Lemon Squeezy; orders, subscription invoices and refunds are read.
• StripeCheckout for personal licences and invoices for company ones; both are read, invoices linking by email.

03Where buyers come from

• VS Code MarketplaceThe listing's homepage and pricing links send developers who've already installed; marketplace.visualstudio.com shows as their referrer.
• GitHub issuesUsers filing issues or reading the changelog follow links to your site from github.com, a source of buyers who already depend on the extension.
• ColleaguesA developer pastes your pricing link into a team chat for a manager to approve; those arrive as shared links in Readable Direct.
• Conference talksA talk or podcast mention sends people who type the name; a short UTM link on the last slide gives them a source.

04What Tally answers

1. Who bought the company licence, and what did they read first?

   The visitor list shows each buyer's location, latest source, pages, engaged time and payment. Open the manager's journey and you can see whether they arrived from a shared link and went straight to pricing.

   Visitors and journeys

2. How long does the trial run before people buy?

   Path to purchase gives the median time from first visit to purchase and a histogram of it, so you can see whether buyers pay as the trial ends or weeks later.

   Path to purchase

3. Does the Marketplace listing sell, or do our GitHub links?

   The referrer breakdown gives the Marketplace, GitHub and every other referrer a row with the revenue of the visitors they sent.

   Sources with revenue

4. Do company licences sell on weekdays and personal ones at weekends?

   Peak hours shows sales or revenue by weekday and hour; run it over a quarter and the split between office-hours and weekend purchases shows, with the top three hours named once the data supports it.

   Peak hours

5. Which talk brought the team that bought twenty licences?

   The receipt for that sale lists the visits before it, the credited one and how the payment was linked, whether by the visitor's id or by an identified email.

   Receipts

05Numbers worth watching

Median time to buy

Median time from first visit to purchase; with an in-editor trial, expect it to sit around the trial's length.

Revenue by source

The money behind the Marketplace, GitHub and talks, which separates a big referrer from a profitable one.

Renewals

Yearly licence renewals by first source; company licences renew differently from personal ones, and this shows by how much.

06An example

07Setting up

1. Any HTML siteAdd the tag to the head of every page of the extension's site, including docs, pricing and the licence portal.
2. PaddlePass tally_visitor_id in customData when the pricing page opens Paddle checkout, so licences and their renewals link with high confidence.
3. Call tally('identify', { email }) when someone signs in to your licence portal, so invoices paid later by their company can link by email.

08Questions

• A manager buys the licence a developer asked for. Is it linked to the developer?

  Only if the payment can be tied to a browser or email that Tally knows: the manager's own visit with the visitor's id, or an identified email. Otherwise it's counted as unlinked rather than guessed.

• Can Tally read JetBrains Marketplace sales?

  No. JetBrains sells and pays out those plugins itself. Licences sold on your own site through Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy or Polar are read.

• Our trial is enforced in the editor. Does Tally know when it ends?

  No. It sees the purchase when it happens and measures the time from the buyer's first visit to it; the trial clock stays in your extension.