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[…] sometimes-partner-in-crime, V. Scott Ellis, wrote a post for WebLogTools Collection called “Exploring the GPL, Viable Models, and Business Risk.” WebLogTools is a blog about blogs, blogging, WordPress and best practices therein. It […]
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[…] Discussion about the GPL, business models for WordPress developers at weblog tools collection. […]
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While GPL is somewhat limiting in commercial sense, it’s something that we have to live with. I am WordPress only devloper for more than 2 years now, and I have managed to make a living with 2 different approaches. One is to work for clients on WordPress related projects: building specific plugins or themes and (from recently) premium plugins and soon themes.
First method is good, but you need a lot of experience and knowledge about WP/PHP/mySQL and even HTML/CSS to be able to work on wide range of projects clients may demand. This is something you can do regardless of the GPL license, and there will always be many projects for clients that decide to work with WP. And for the past two years I had to turn down many such projects because I was overwhelmed with projects offers, and I always had plenty to choose from, and I managed to work on very interesting projects.
Premium plugins are still not fully accepted by WordPress community, and most users still prefer free plugins over premium. But, real advantage of premium plugins over time will be payed support. Lester Chan is one of the most important WordPress developers, and his decision to stop supporting his plugins is proving the point that free support for popular plugins is not going to last, and most authors will either release premium versions of plugins, or starts some sort of payed support service. I think that once the users accept that paying for support is a good think, we will see more great plugins. Paying plugin author for support of premium features will enable said author to make plugin(s) even better, and will ensure that less experienced users get help with the plugin.
In 2009, theme developers embraced GPL model, and with themes that are much better than free alternatives, premium themes market expanded. Support was major reason for this, and themes grew more complex and provided much wider choice to users, while they had support to fall back to if the problem was found. Supported free themes are very, very rare and if you are building website from scratch you need reliable theme. Big theme developers like WooThemes and StudioPress have pushed themes much further than free themes were able to.
My current business model is that I work for few clients on different WP related projects, and I also dedicate about 50% of my time to premium plugins and soon premium themes. I am patient with premium plugins, and over the past two months I am satisfied with sales I had, and I expect numbers to go up. Until that happens, balancing with clients projects is great source of income.
Let start by saying that I am not a developer… I am a content producer morphing into a web publisher… without WordPress and the free themes and plug-ins, my path would have been even more difficult than it has been.
My suggestion is that WordPress should start some kind of general contribution bank so that users like myself can easily deposit $10, $20 or $50 to our “accounts” that we can use to reward or tip plug-in developers whose work proves to be truly valuable in our adaptation of WordPress to our individual publishing needs…
The idea of paying upfront for plug-ins that we are not sure will work the way we want with our chosen themes, etc. is not appealing.
The adoption of the premium or subscription model will slow the critical mass growth that WordPress is currently experiencing…. and end up being counterproducitve in the long run…
I also create websites for clients and a big selling point is the WP price… FREE… plus the knowledge that the platform has proven reliable for millions of users…
If I can download many plug-ins from the repository without having to worry about paying for every single one, or subscribing to various “Clubs” or Premium Plans, then it is easier for me and my clients to try them out and use the ones we know work and continue to use WordPress…
I have tried a Theme Forest theme.. I paid $25 for it and it did not work out for the use as I had hoped… adios dinero for that one
If I could put that same $25 or more into a WP account and use it to “tip” theme and plug-in authors whose work I find useable and reliable, then I would happily send a few bucks their way… the guy who developed the WP Auto Update plug-in would be first on that list… as well as a couple of theme authors
multiply that by tens of thousands of users like myself and the developers (like Lester Chan) who turn out consistently great product would find themselves with a nice cash stream coming their way…
I am not talking about charging, I am talking about having a one stop money pot so I can tip my favorite theme and plug-in authors…
without having to go thru the hassle of making PayPal payments to each and every one…
that’s my two centavos’worth on this subject…
From what I’ve seen (though the experience of others), almost no one donates to plugins, even ones with a “donate” link on the WordPress.org plugin page. I don’t know if it is possible to make it easier to donate (pressing a link and going to a PayPal page is about as simple as it gets), and making it more difficult won’t increase the amount of donations/tips.
Really, charging for support (or in some rare cases, chartered features) is the only way I see as feasible for generating income off of a plugin.
The difference in my proposal is that I don’t have to donate with a separate payPal transaction to each plug-in or theme… I am proposing that WordPress set up a “donation bank” where i can make “deposits” that I can use to “credit” developers whose themes and plug-ins I find truly useful and that actually work.
It seems to me that if WP and Matt make itg clear that this is the way forward to ensuring we have an ongoing developer community working on free plug-ins and themes, that many more people will be inclined to make “deposits” to the “bank” that they can assign to their favorite developers…
One transaction on an occasional basis as opposed to numerous small transactions (in terms of using PayPal) and the easy ability to assign credits where credits are desired to go…
Back to blogger and google… after themes, plugins how can we milk the cow? Most plugins function can be done by adding a few lines in the functions.php, that can be done using the wordpress editor, so next move will be charging users for that info? what a joke…
Lester Chan like most people sooner or later will have to move on… better job…family… donating or paying wont assure us he will continue.
Everyone wants to mik the cow…thats how i see it.
If this movement carries on ill be moving back to blogger.
If you can do what a plugin like Shopp or Gravity Forms does simply by adding a few lines of code to your function.php file… you my friend would be rich!
Nobody is saying ALL plugins should be sold or monetized and I think people are missing the point.
The plugins that make sense to monetize are the plugins that add extensive functionality to WordPress and AREN’T TARGETED AT BLOGGERS because WordPress is used for far more than just blogging.
Businesses use plugins like Shopp and Gravity Forms to help run their businesses so why is it wrong for those plugins to be monetized and turned into products that businesses can rely on?
A lot of software ( on and off the web ) is going the NPR model: being freely distributable and usable, but asking for donations. I’m curious how well that’s worked out for different applications, plugins, and the like? It is certainly another way a person could approach the thorny GPL issue, however.
WordPress Plugin developers have been asking for donations for a long time now and some of the most popular plugins, which have been downloaded millions of times, garner next to nothing in donations. The WordPress.org Plugin Repository has donation capabilities built in.
The donation model doesn’t work. Not enough people donate. That has already been proven in the WordPress community.
I don’t mind paying for a great plug-in. These plug-in developers are great in this kind of work, so it is just right that their efforts be compensated. How many more Lester Chan’s do we have to lose before we see this?
There’s a lot of businesses running WordPress and they don’t mind paying for themes and plugins if it saves them time or improves business.
I just bought a theme from Woo for my blog. Why? It looks great, someone recommended it and I like the fact that they do regular bugfixes and will upgrade it to work with future versions of WordPress.
When anyone thinks about having his business online, he thinks about the online store or website he can make use of. Now many of the small businessmen don’t have luxury to get the premium websites and they incline towards the free software and plug-ins like WordPress, Joomla, etc. But the free plug-ins & themes are not so impressive to catch the impression and this is the time for smaller developers to sale their themes, templates, etc. to get money….actually whole of this is dependent on each other..:)