The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution - they might pay for a third-world competitor's one that's 10x cheaper, or they may not pay for anything at all.
I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework. A WP plugin is relatively hard to sell at a good price (let's be honest, with a 100$ price which is pretty steep you're only recouping a little bit of the time spent developing the plugin, and I'm not even talking about mandatory tech support you'll have to provide). Excluding a few outlier plugins that have exploded in popularity, a PHP developer's job at a company or as a freelancer building quality products will earn you way more cash.
Of course this assumes you want to do legitimate business - if we go down the scammy route you could pretty much sell anything - even an empty PHP file - there are a lot of idiots out there who'll happily buy your "magic" plugin based only on your (fake) sales pitch.
> The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution
You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand.
> I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework.
As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-)
But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market.
And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).
Move on from wordpress
...because? That is a pretty strong statement, and some reasoning for that would be useful. As it is, your comment is spammy and out of place.