Drupal Forge is a non-profit project of the Drupal community. Our mission is to support vendors that devote a portion of their revenue to sustaining the software and infrastructure Drupal needs to be a great product. Our product launch buttons are part of a business module to sustain contribution. This is what makes them different from launch buttons that hosting vendors offer on their own.
Every product on Drupal Forge will have a product owner. For example, the Drupal CMS being developed by the Starshot initiative will be owned by the Drupal Association. You will be able to register with product owners on Drupal Forge to become a vendor of their products. When you are registered as a vendor, you will get a launch button for your site that launches a product trial directly on your hosting platform. If a user launches a trial site from a Drupal Forge product page, they will have the option of choosing you as their vendor before their trial expires.
In return, you will support the product in one of two ways. Your first option will be to share a portion of subscription revenue with the product owner on an on-going basis. Your second option will be to give a referral fee to the product owner for each customer who subscribes to your service. For example, DreamHost gives affiliates US$100 for each yearly subscription to the DreamHost Shared Unlimited plan. We hope you will choose the first option, because a recurring revenue stream is what makes products sustainable.
You will not need to have your own hosting platform or payment processing service to register as a vendor. We are working on a ready-made vendor package that will allow anyone to sell hosting from AWS or Digital Ocean. We will help you get set up with Stripe for collecting payments from your customers.
Even if a product owner does not make you an official vendor, you will be able to get a launch button from Drupal Forge to sell hosting for their product. In that case, you would decide how to split the subscription revenue. For example, you could set up Stripe to deposit 80% to your bank account, 10% to the Drupal Association, and 10% split between maintainers of projects that are important to your customers.
More advanced vendors can sell bundled services and customized products, which I will cover next.