Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin | Hacker News Reader

Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin

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25 pointsprostoalex19 comments

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.

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?

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Actually I welcomed curious customers to buy (for much higher, unpublished fee) fully open sourced version.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

> $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything.

I doubt this very much. You get a bunch of half baked code that you now have to maintain.

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.

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.

The issue is more that as soon as that one percent decrypts it, the source will be on piratebay within of just a few hours.

Yes. And also add to it - infested with malware injected by the one who added it.

You grab the software via thepiratebay - and your site or your computer becomes a zombie. Lots of people know that and so that never been a threat to me. And then - cracked version got outdated pretty soon as well.

On a final note - cracked copies actually worked as a free advertisement - in fact I contemplated to upload clean "cracked" version of my software to a few sites for that specific purpose. This helps business, rare hurts.

That actually depends – many of the larger groups in piracy do not want to harm their reputation, and actually provide email support for their cracks, with guarantuee to be malware free.

Sadly, especially in gaming, their support tends to work better than the official support, with some groups even providing fixes and patches for bugs existing in the official game.

I own all the games that I play, but often, years after the activation servers have been shut down, the only solution is to use pirated versions.

The general consensus for business software - i.e. software that helps people to make money - these customers are not interested in torrent sharing communities to save $100 bucks.

If product helps them to make money and receive support from dedicated vendor - they are ready to spend 10 times that much or more.

They don't play these games.

I have seen lots of companies using pirated windows, adobe software, etc.

I’ve seen schools use pirated Zarb, etc.

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

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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!?

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.

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