Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin

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by prostoalex • 11 years ago

25 19 11 years ago

deliciousbrains.com

gesman6• 11 years ago

I've authored commercial membership plugin memberwing a while ago. Total revenues including consulting fees and subsequent sale of it as a business (with more of subsequent consulting) are in 6 figures. It's a good strategy of free version for promotion of commercial version although Wordress is strict in terms of how much you allowed to pimp your commercial stuff through their free plugins repository.

If your plugin helps people to make money - price tag could be higher vs. utility plugins.

To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts.

Paypal is a popular payment processor to sell through although nothing prevents buyer from buying and then requesting refund next minute and Paypal will not always be on your side for digital products. I've created my own commercial license tracking system wrapped in encoded PHP that also warns about expiring license and asked for renewal. If buyer pulls "refund" trick on me - I've deactivated license remotely and that disabled plugin for offending customer.

Consulting was a big source of revenues as some customers wanted to add this and that feature and some ended up paying $10,000-20,000 per lifetime for extras. This is pretty impressive considering that PHP is not exactly big money making skill.

lucaspiller• 11 years ago

I guess it's hard to tell, but do you have any ideas about how the licensing and encoding have helped your revenue? Have you had any customers unhappy that they weren't able to look at the source?

gesman6• 11 years ago

Licensing helped to collect recurring fees from existing customers. Yearly "Maintenance" fee ~= 20% of initial license in my case. So it helped.

Actually I welcomed curious customers to buy (for much higher, unpublished fee) fully open sourced version.

Nowadays any PHP/wordpress plugin type of business is based on sand anyways just because $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything.

I figured that its better to take the money if offered.

kuschku4• 11 years ago

And all it takes is one college kid a weekend to break your system. And you’ll lose more than half of your revenue stream.

gesman6• 11 years ago

Yes, but it was enough to distract 99% of kiddies from copycatting it. 1% wasn't a threat to business. Just a sale that would never happen anyways.

voltagex_• 11 years ago

Yeah - http://www.almahdi.cc/programming/zencrypt-php-encoder

devicenull• 11 years ago

To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts.

100%? eval() is pretty commonly disabled for security reasons.

elmin• 11 years ago

We're dealing with many of the same issues at Eager (https://eager.io). We're considerably younger as app stores go, going us a shot to iterate. The insights in write ups like this are therefore very helpful.

simonswords822• 11 years ago

Hey, I looked at your site and I don't understand why I would use Eager over the Wordpress official plugin directory. I'm a moron, help!?

redgrange• 11 years ago

I'm guessing their tool isn't just wordpress specific. I guess kind of a grander scale project than http://sumome.com/ but in the same vein.

ac29• 11 years ago

It is generally accepted these days that commercial plugins are sold with an annual license giving the customer 1 year of access to support and software updates.

As a person developing WP based sites for a small business, this is a huge sticking issue. I absolutely agree support should be charged for on a case/time based basis, but limiting updates essentially means the site will be broken after the license term. WP moves fast enough that keeping up with core/plugin/etc revisions on at least a quarterly basis is necessary if you don't want your site to be broken or hacked.

I think the minimum for at least security/compatibility/bug fixes should be 2-3 years. The products we sell have a 3-year warranty for all defects, yet your proposed software business model wont do that.

Last point: you want $90-1000/year to upload databases to S3? Isnt this a trivial amount of developer effort to automate? I am not a developer by any means, and I could do this fairly quickly. Numerous high quality plugins will do backups for free and writing a cron job to upload these to S3 would take a few minutes. If I'm just misunderstanding, your page is doing a poor job on selling me the real advantages.

simonswords822• 11 years ago

I think the majority of wordpress website owners have a very basic understanding of technology. This means it's possible to build and monetise plugins that do things you and I might consider trivial - and that's a good thing if it's done well and customers derive real value in exchange for their $/£'s.

It's extra overhead for developers to update an application to fix security/compatibility/bug fixes without including new features too. There would need to be two versions of the app, one with just bug/security fixes and one with bug/security fixes + new features. That's two code bases, two sets of testing required, two sets of releases and release notes/change logs. As a result, asking customers to pay for a year of upgrades/support seems fair. If customers continue to derive value over that year, they can purchase again for another year. If not, they can abandon it.

Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin

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