From Iain on the Delicious Brains blog:
Building software to sell is a tricky business. It isn’t always as simple as writing code and getting people to buy it. WordPress commercial plugins come with their own set of considerations, issues and complications.
Here at Delicious Brains we’ve gone down the route of having a free “lite” plugin on WordPress.org along with a “pro” plugin: a commercial version that beefs up the functionality and comes with email support. It’s a model that has worked well for WP Migrate DB Pro and is the same path we’re taking for the upcoming commercial edition of the Amazon S3 and CloudFront (AS3CF Pro) plugin.
However, throw the potential for addon functionality, pricing, branding and code issues into the mix and things get complicated rather quickly. I thought it would be helpful for others (and cathartic for us!) to step through some of the challenges we have faced recently and how to mitigate them in the future.
A bunch of good advice is on this post. It’s a tough one to bullet point, but in total I enjoyed the insight I got from their experience.
