Ultimate Member has really come out of the gate speeding. An impressive free plugin with monetization options via an extensions model, Ultimate Member is proving to be an attractive option for a combination of membership website and community solution.
From my point of view, Ultimate Member is really tackling many of the problems a content and community centric site is looking to solve (sites like mine…): user roles, member directories, and content restriction are base features, and a lot of social components are available with the paid extensions. An interesting exception is the eCommerce component, which they leave completely to a WooCommerce extension, not a home-grown extension.
As Chris Lema noted in his review of Ultimate Member, membership sites don’t have to be eCommerce related, because, “belonging isn’t a financial instrument.” And while someone that does want paid memberships with Ultimate Member will then end up digging well into the bowels of all that is WooCommerce, Ultimate Member is obviously touching a nerve in the WordPress space with the base functionality, having racked up 20,000+ installs on WordPress.org in less than a year, and averaging $712 per day in sales of extensions.
Their revenue for the short year (they started selling in March) was over $210,000. These numbers and more are in their year in review post. Ultimate Member is doing a lot of smart work, and their strategy for growing in 2015 is worth looking into further if you are looking to do a big plugin launch.
