7 Comments

  1. This article makes a compelling case for the WordPress plugin freemium model. It’s a well-reasoned and informative exploration of the benefits of offering both free and premium versions of plugins. The insights into how this model can enhance user experiences, foster community engagement, and support sustainable development are invaluable. As a WordPress enthusiast, I appreciate the author’s perspective and the practical advice provided. Thanks for shedding light on the potential of the freemium approach for WordPress plugins!

  2. I’m in a unique but good position with WebDevStudios, truth be told. While I wasn’t around for the initial launch of our Custom Post Type UI plugin, I have been manning that ship since spring 2013, so coming up on 10 years now. Given the way that the .org search works, we have “custom post type” right in the title and that has to be doing us way more good than harm. at this point.

    Whats even more interesting and fun is that post types and taxonomies don’t change THAT much that frequently, that we’re able to maintain a very small dedicated team of me, and occasional community and/or internal WebDevStudios contributions to keep it going considerably strongly. At the time of this comment, some 1 million active installs, with 12,298,446 all time downloads.

    A “simple” premise of some UI to well handle what normally takes coding knowledge, plus a spot-on plugin name, and top notch support taking us far.

    I would dare say I’m more synonymous with Custom Post Type UI than Brad at the moment because of my direct involvement over years, though I absolutely accept and know CPTUI is more synonymous with WebDevStudios in the end.

  3. Hey Matt! This is copy & paste from my response to one of Cory Miller’s posts also which is also talking about the exact same topic.

    My brother Spencer and I have owned a plugin company since 2010. Fighting for top spot on the .org repo was crucial for us in the past. We are in the 70-80K plus active installs range!

    We tried to break in with other plugins as established wp plugin developers. Recently, we decided to cut the other plugin(s) from the repo. We had customers telling us it was the best plugin they had used and solved what they trying to do. The problem is when we are stacked in the search with plugins not even related to what we were trying to achieve with much larger active installed plugins were showing over ours even though they were practically unrelated to search queries used. Our data compared to our social plugin (the 10 year plus 70K active install one, was crazy as almost every free install was a premium extension sale of some kind. We could tell we were lost in a search where people were looking for a plugin such as ours but general “Photo” plugins where coming up instead no matter what we tried. Even tactics that had proven to work for our main plugin in the past. We also tried other marketing plans. After many hours, a few years and almost little to no growth no matter the hours or money spent we decided to pull it from the repo. We have had many of the users emailing us saying that there was no plugin that was even close to what we had. Woocommerce offers an extension that is supposed to achieve what ours does but has terrible reviews and didn’t offer nearly the functionality.

    I think that when WordPress converted the .org repo from the old system to the elasticsearch it was more about ranking with installs then “relativity” and “recently updated”.

    With our main plugin we have ways we hook people into purchasing our premium extensions but would would be awesome to see is a standardized way for free plugins to do this. I imagine a hook were users installing plugins see premium extensions list offered by the plugins/themes. If we standardize a button to display a clean and not overly spammy way where devs can hook into that show users what they offer that is premium would be useful. Not a “Premium plugins store” but simply a page, list or way to to display offerings within the repo that users – can choose (hidden at first) – to click see that would take them to place to purchase. There would also be a similar and standardized way of hooking into displaying the list/page on the wordpress install’s backend. This would really clean the mess of premium extension/plugin messages and could get WordPress users understanding a formal/standardized way of seeing what plugins have available at a premium cost.

    This is just an one of many solutions that will likely be proposed. Great to see discussion around the topic again!

  4. Thank you for sharing this Matt! You wrote everything I though after reading Alex’s article, which is indeed interesting. I also believe freemium still makes a lot of sense! It’s been working great for me.

    I only kinda disagree with one of your tips: Launch day one with your free and paid options.
    I think it depends. If you’re just starting, I believe you can go with an MVP to test demand and work from there. If you’re already an established developer or have a team, then you can indeed do that, free pro from day one.

    Cheers, Carlos

    1. Thanks Carlos! That’s a good caveat about launching. There nuance to every type of product launch, and that last paragraph needs to be its own full series of articles honestly. But I’ll stick to my guns here and say that in an ideal situation launching with both from day one would bring better results long term. Thanks for reading and chiming in!

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