
Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin - prostoalex
https://deliciousbrains.com/struggles-developing-commercial-wordpress-plugin/?utm_source=Email+marketing+software&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-article&utm_content=struggles-developing-commercial-wordpress-plugin
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gesman
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.

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kuschku
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.

~~~
voltagex_
Yeah - [http://www.almahdi.cc/programming/zencrypt-php-
encoder](http://www.almahdi.cc/programming/zencrypt-php-encoder)

~~~
gesman
He suggests using ionCube and alike.

The biggest problem with ionCube is that it requires support from hosting
company providers. Some do not support it and then your customers cannot use
your ionCube-encoded software.

Zencoder offers 100%-hosting supported solution. It's ability to be decoded by
geeks is not a problem. It's 80/20 solution and it good enough for wordpress-
plugin protection type of purposes. Definitely worth effort from my side.

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ac29
>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.

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simonswords82
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.

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elmin
We're dealing with many of the same issues at Eager
([https://eager.io](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.

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simonswords82
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
I'm guessing their tool isn't just wordpress specific. I guess kind of a
grander scale project than [http://sumome.com/](http://sumome.com/) but in the
same vein.

