This article is a member contribution from Scott Bolinger. Scott is the founder of Holler Box and the co-founder of AppPresser.
The WordPress economy is changing, and many businesses are feeling it.
The market is maturing, and customers are behaving differently. It’s happening slowly, but I think everyone realizes things are changing.
Often this change has been discussed in terms of hosts and agencies, but let’s talk about products.
I just read an article on Indie Hackers about MH Themes, a premium theme shop that started in 2013. They describe a hard-fought journey to a solid $30K in monthly revenue, but they have noticed big changes in the market since they started.
The author, Michael Hebenstreit, puts it this way:
Back in 2013 it was much easier to launch a WordPress theme and make it somewhat popular. Today the market for WordPress themes has become heavily crowded and oversaturated. It’s near to impossible to make a theme highly successful without investing lots of time and money in marketing and building a community behind your product.
It comes as no surprise that the theme business is saturated; it has been for years. I would now say the plugin business is saturated as well.
From 2008 to 2010 you could have released just about any decent plugin or theme, and it would have done fairly well, simply because there was very little competition. The WordPress market was in an early and extreme growth phase. People were realizing there was money to be made.
Many different product categories were ripe for innovation, with no dominant players at all. For example, the eCommerce landscape was wide open before WooCommerce became popular in 2011. Now there is no one even remotely close to them, and competing with WooCommerce doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Today what we see in most product categories is at least one dominant player, and many other new entrants at their heels. Backups, security, SEO, themes, page builders, forms, caching, lead generation, and other categories all have stiff competition.
Previously the competition was a developer trying to figure out how to grow a company. Now it’s a 30+ person organization with millions of dollars in revenue. iThemes, Yoast, Gravity Forms, Awesome Motive, and WooCommerce are just a few. These companies have a loyal following that makes it harder for smaller shops to take a piece of the pie.
Popular plugins now have millions of downloads, lots of articles written about them, and avid fans. They are becoming harder and harder to dethrone, or even to challenge for a slice of market share.
Your product is a commodity
As Alex Turnbull says in this recent article, “if your product isn’t already a commodity, it will become one in the next few years.”
It’s becoming easier and easier to create and sell a product online. Developers are ubiquitous, websites are cheap, and many people can build something on the side with a full time job.
That means when you release a product you not only have the established leaders to contend with, but lots smaller players with great products just getting started. Even if your product is great, there are 10 other great products in the same category.
That doesn’t mean a great product isn’t important — it certainly is. It does mean that it’s not enough.
If your product isn’t enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace, what does it take?
How to bring a new product to market now
The old way of starting a new product might have been to go where there was less competition and create a better product. If there are still places of “less competition” they are much harder to see.
You can go after a niche, but WordPress is already a niche. A niche within a niche is a very small market.
It’s not impossible to slay the giant Goliath product companies. As Jason Cohen points out, they have an Achilles heel: “The profitable revenue stream is a prison.” They are slower to adapt to changes in the marketplace because they can still make money doing what they have always done.
If you are thinking about bringing a new product to market, here are a few observations that may help you.
1) It’s going to be a lot harder than it used to be, and it’s going to take longer.
Can you go for a year (or two) without making any money and still be cranking out code and marketing yourself? That may be what it takes.
Putting up a website and starting a content strategy takes six months to see any solid organic traffic. Publishing your plugin to official WordPress directory does not result in automatic downloads. The newer search algorithms favor the entrenched plugins that have more downloads and reviews.
It’s an uphill battle, and it takes time.
2) You must have a strategic advantage, or a unique difference to win.
Ninja Forms went into a crowded space against one of the most popular plugins of all time, Gravity Forms. They gained an advantage by offering a free version and distributing it on the directory, while Gravity Forms was entirely commercial. Why did they do so much better than other free form plugins? I don’t know, but they certainly executed well, and they have created a great brand.
Can you find a competitive advantage and exploit it?
One weakness I see in many WordPress companies is marketing. Many of the early successes in WordPress were coders who made a cool plugin. Most of them are not marketers, and they have enough business without needing to learn marketing. This leaves the door open for companies with great marketing.
Can you dominate an under-marketed product category?
You are going to have to do something different and better than what has come before. Copying a business model that worked in 2012 is not a good strategy.
3) Branding is more important than ever.
Your brand is what will help you gain market share against your competitors.
A brand is not your logo, and it’s not what you say about your company. It’s what they say. They, as in, your customers.
Providing great customer service, getting to know people at events, being helpful on social media, providing refunds without asking questions — these are all parts of your brand. Being known for doing good work is another, so that when you release a new product, people just buy it.
I think of the brand Pippin Williamson has built for himself, since he is known for putting out high quality products. I will buy a plugin he makes over a more established competitor because of his reputation for quality. iThemes is another great example of a company that cares about their customers. They have built a brand on integrity.
Building a brand takes time, but it is more important than ever.
Looking forward
The WordPress market is no longer high growth and low competition.
The companies involved in products are maturing into well staffed, well funded operations. Their fans are loyal, and their products are entrenched. This makes it harder for new entrants into the market to compete.
New products must have a well thought out strategy to gain traction in this competitive marketplace. Without unique positioning and hard fought execution, they will not survive.
It’s not all bad news, because this is how most marketplaces look already. It’s a sign that those of us who make products need to get more creative about how we approach product development and marketing.
As the more successful companies get larger, they will also become more resistant to change. When this happens, newer product offerings will be able to steal market share with fast paced innovation and development.
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Great article! I think that everyone selling plugins is noticing in one way or another the changes in the market. To what you wrote Brian i would also add changes in the pricing.
Few years ago plugin or theme for about $39 with lifetime updates and support was something users were expecting, these days even a small plugin or WooCommerce extension can cost around $79 and it includes a one year of support and updates plus there is no renewal discount. I am not saying this is good or bad i am just saying this is a change that took place.
I think that in WordPress plugins ecosystem there are still niches you can enter and dominate by simply having a better plugin (just in terms of extensibility, documentation, UI, UX or even design). Those niches will not make you a millionaire but will allow earning a living selling your products and this is what a lot of people creating WordPress plugins want.
If someone wants to enter a crowded market then i think that at this point it is much better to just create an add-on for a bigger plugin like WooCommerce, just few days ago there was an article or WPTavern about Katie and her husband (https://wptavern.com/from-building-wordpress-sites-to-selling-plugins-in-one-year) who switched from building sites for customers to selling their own plugins.
As a successful web design company in a specific industry niche, we have always had to buy a multitude of plugins and themes not only for our development team but for clients as well.
Since the migration to the ‘rental’ mode of plugins and themes, we are now very, very careful about what we buy because we know we are going to be locked in to years of expense.
For a successful web design firm like us it would not be difficult to end up with a yearly license fee due every day of the year!
Just the bookkeeping alone can be a nightmare… dealing with hundreds of vendors. (We don’t allow auto/recurring payment because of many problems we’ve had with vendors who did not alert us 30 days in advance that they were going to re-charge us when we didn’t want to continue with their product. Getting our money back was often a struggle.)
Our clients don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for a new website and be told that with a theme and perhaps a dozen plugins each with a $50 yearly cost, they will ALSO pay $650 a year for at least 3 years… not to us, but to vendors they don’t know… AND there is no guarantee that that cost won’t be arbitrarily raised by the vendors… (i.e. held hostage for a ‘ransom’ payment.)
Both our clients and ourselves (for our tooling) were fine with a one-time payment. We could budget for that and purchase many more software products. Not anymore. These days we have pivoted and look for open-source solutions for ourselves and clients. It makes for and “easier” sale and often the products are just as good.
Many design firms think the plugin and theme vendors have shot themselves in the foot with the ‘rental’ model. We all know that most so-called upgrades are ‘fluff’ add-ons that are neither needed nor wanted.
Our criteria for trying (buying into) new products is that we have to be reasonably assured that we will get 36 months of use from a product before we are ‘forced’ to pay for an upgrade. We also require that all security fixes be free.
In some cases we have taken GPL code, stripped it down to core essentials, in essence have we-written it.. and have provided it to clients. We have a deep tech-bench in PHP and other coding paradigms. That might not be a solution for other design firms who don’t have a coding staff.
As a side note, because of all the above… we are looking at alternatives to WP. The Grav (getgrav.org) system holds quite a bit of interest to us right now.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. In some ways, I would agree with you, that it doesn’t make sense for your clients to keeping for software to vendors they don’t know. However, I would also have to consider this the price of doing business, just as I have always done, as I don’t have the bandwidth to build every single feature for my clients. In my opinion, paying vendors that I don’t know, for software that I use on a daily basis, which also helps me to bring in a positive income, is expected. It’s up to me to inform and educate my clients on that fact that they will need to maintain updates and keep software licenses, for software that powers their businesses, up to date as well. I also consider it a priority to educate my clients on the foundations of WordPress and how the marketplace works.
I sell plugins and themes as my core business, now and started off selling lifetime licenses for our plugins. However, as we found over the years, that is not a sustainable business model because you end up supporting software indefinitely and without a renewing source of income. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s a sustainable business model, especially for open source software vendors that rely on the sales of their software to survive.
For example, let’s say I sell you a lifetime license for a plugin, which you successfully use and profit from for a few years. However, since you’ve installed it, there have been several WordPress security updates that have now broken this plugin you’ve come to rely on so heavily. So you reach out me, the original plugin developer, only to find that I have since moved on and am no longer maintaining the plugin for which you paid a lifetime license.
My reply to you is that I was unable to grow the business and am no longer supporting the plugin, then I recommend that you pay someone to fix it, which will cost hundreds of more dollars than you paid for the plugin in the first place.
The other option is that you can migrate to his competitor who charges a yearly fee meanwhile growing and maintaining the product and fixing security issues, as they arise.
Just my two cents.
I really enjoyed reading this perspective. Based on what you shared, I agree that plugin licensing from a web design vantage point poses difficulties that wouldn’t otherwise be there with regards to client work – especially in the context of a site needing many paid plugins/add-ons.
I’m curious about this statement:
“Many design firms think the plugin and theme vendors have shot themselves in the foot with the ‘rental’ model.”
Personally, I have never thought of our yearly pricing as a “rental”. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of software licensing referred to in that way, but maybe I just haven’t been around the block. Support & updates in the WP world are very real costs (more so than a SaaS, but that’s probably a subject for another time). And, seeing as we don’t control the PRIMARY platform (WordPress), if someone wishes to have continued updates & support for compatibility then it makes sense from a business perspective that people pay for this service.
I don’t feel like we’ve ‘shot ourselves in the foot’ when we changed licensing terms many years back. As a result we became more profitable year-over-year, we were able to hire more (and better) support and developers because of this predictable profitability, and we greatly improved the quality of our software — a direct benefit to not just the one-off customer but design firms as well.
If I may offer a thought from the other side, we see the WordPress plugin industry as existing in a weird limbo state with regards to pricing.
Plugins can save small and medium sized businesses tens of thousands of dollars a year (as is the case in our industry). We get corporate customers who don’t trust our pricing because it is WAY too low, and on the flip side we have WordPress users who ask for additional discounts on our pricing.
The hard part for a theme or plugin business is to attempt to find that “sweet spot” without devaluing the work you’re doing just because it’s on WordPress.
Justin this is a great point. Scott previously made another point that if WordPress shops were running a Brick and Mortar store, the costs would be WAY more than the…let’s say $5,000/year it takes me to run my online shop.
I think, frankly, WordPress users (and in general the open source community) need to reset their expectations about pricing. If a plugin or theme saves you $10,000, you should *gladly* pay $150-300/year for that.
“I think, frankly, WordPress users (and in general the open source community) need to reset their expectations about pricing. If a plugin or theme saves you $10,000, you should *gladly* pay $150-300/year for that.”
You are thinking like a vendor, not a customer. Go and call 25 of your customers, but don’t identify yourself. Tell them you are doing a survey about plugin pricing.
Ask them if they want to pay recurring licensing fees for security updates or if they think that it is the responsibility of the vendor to provide them for at least two or three years as a “cost of doing business” and as customer service.
I know that when WP brings out an update that breaks a theme or plugin and the vendor says I ( or our client) has to pay for the update (before 36 months) we pay it or tell customer to pay it (if we have to,) but will never do business with that vendor again. We refuse to be held hostage for a ransom payment. If you can’t warrentee your code for 36 months, we don’t want you as a vendor.
(Of course you will see it differently and that is expected. But what matters is how your customer sees it. They put the bread on your table.)
Do most of your customers think the way we do… that it is YOUR responsibility to keep your product running for more than one year without additional cost? Ask them and find out.
See what they say and report back here.
There’s a big disconnect here between what you want and what is reasonable to request. Just because you don’t want to pay for plugin security and updates doesn’t mean that’s what you should get.
Plugin developers need to be paid for their work, or else they will do something else, abandoning their code. It happens all the time with free plugins (see Postman as a recent example). When that happens, it costs a lot more than the plugin update fee to re-tool using a new plugin.
It’s much better to pay a small fee to make sure your plugins are kept up to date. As a business owner, I pay hundreds each year in renewals, and I’m happy to do it. I’m essentially paying a team of great devs to answer my emails, keep my plugins free of security vulnerabilities, and add new features for less than $1/day per plugin.
If you think that’s too much money to pay for the software that keeps your business website running, you should try building everything yourself and see how that goes.
> Plugins can save small and medium sized businesses tens of thousands of dollars a year (as is the case in our industry). We get corporate customers who don’t trust our pricing because it is WAY too low, and on the flip side we have WordPress users who ask for additional discounts on our pricing.
> The hard part for a theme or plugin business is to attempt to find that “sweet spot” without devaluing the work you’re doing just because it’s on WordPress.
My sentiments exactly!
I do understand your POV with regard to sustainability. What we have is a market disconnect. I expect vendors to solve my problems as I’m the customer. You are expecting me, the customer to solve your problems.
Markets, for better or worse, are most often customer-centric unless the system is based on a real or near monopoly.
If I tell you that I won’t buy your theme or plugin unless you guarantee me that it will run for three years without additional cost (i.e. security updates) what option do you have, assuming that I have options to buy from another vendor, or create the functionality myself?
If WordPress creates an update that breaks your plugin or theme and you believe that you can hold your user-base ‘hostage’ to paying for the fix or for a security update, I think you are sadly mistaken.
In my experience (as a full-stack software engineer) 99% of the theme and plugin issues with WP updates is due to sloppy or faulty coding on the part of the theme/plugin developer.
Why don’t the major auto manufacturers make us pay for recall fixes? Breaks? Airbags? Why not? We both know the answer here.
If the vendor takes the customer’s money for a product, there is a contract between them. The vendor wants to only support their software product for a year. The customer wants triple that. Who will win this dispute? My bet is that the customer will win.
With some exceptions (i.e. when their company totally depends on one supplier) the customer is really not that concerned with the viability of the vendor. It is not their problem. They worry about their own sustainability, not ‘yours.’
I could be your customer… I might be in a position buy hundreds of your product for clients… but if your business model does not meet my needs (i.e. demands) than I go somewhere else.
I’m 69 years old and have built many companies (and have failed with a fair number of them!!) My advice for every vendor is to look into the soul of their customers and give them what they want. Maybe you have to raise your price to do it… or perhaps you need to scale down the product. One thing I know for certain is that you can’t remain in business trying to make your customer care about or even understand YOUR problems. They (we) don’t care as long as we have options.
Your job is to care about MY needs. My job is NOT to care about yours. Most young (millennial) business start-ups don’t understand this… but eventually they will (have to.)
That’s the beauty of WordPress. It’s not a closed source platform (as many people are used to) and most of the time will continue to perform as expected unless server architecture changes or something is installed that conflicts abd renders it useless.
I could be wrong here but since many of the plugins for WordPress are also open source, you, the customer, now OWNs the code and can choose to keep using the software forever, but if things break, it’s up to you to fix it.
That’s where yearly, open source software licenses come in. We, the developers, maintain and distribute open source code that powers your business. Since we don’t own the code installed on your website, you pay us to maintain it.
The alternative to that is that you can hire a team of developers to maintain it for you and probably at a much higher cost. However, you also have the freedom to distribute the updates and sell licenses for that same code.
IMO, closed source software philosophies don’t mesh well with open source standards.
@AL, you bring in an interesting perspective to this, that is hard to ignore. While all your points are well-taken, it is simply not possible for a plugin/theme priced below $200 to support for more then a year or lifetime. That includes developers in any part of the world.
> If I tell you that I won’t buy your theme or plugin unless you guarantee me that it will run for three years without additional cost (i.e. security updates) what option do you have, assuming that I have options to buy from another vendor, or create the functionality myself?
I would ask you to buy from another vendor or create it yourself. If you are happy to create it yourself, then once it is built, please do a time & cost comparison on how much you have spent v/s how much you would have spent had you purchased the plugin & renewed it twice (which gives you 36 months of support from the date of purchase).
For vendors (us), it’s better to loose 1 customer then to be out of business due to an unsustainable business model. Plus, everybody has options.
> If WordPress creates an update that breaks your plugin or theme and you believe that you can hold your user-base ‘hostage’ to paying for the fix or for a security update, I think you are sadly mistaken.
This is only if you do not have an active license at that point of time. You can call it as you wish, but people have to spend time to fix that security update or any update that’s needed to make it work.
“Just because you don’t want to pay for plugin security and updates doesn’t mean that’s what you should get.”
Markets are made by customers, not vendors.
The barriers to entry in the WP theme and plugin sector are very low. No one needs to be a full-stack engineer to create a WP theme or plugin. The skill-set necessary can be learned in a reasonable number of hours of solid study and there is no shortage of resource material and tutorials out there.
In addition there is no shortage of software talent out there worldwide willing to work-for-hire (at low cost) to meet customer needs.
Thus, I think many theme and plugin creators have an unrealistic image of themselves with respect to the current market for their products in the current WP environment.
It will be interesting to see what the customer renewal/retention rate is on what some call “rental software.”
Microsoft and Adobe will get succeed with it because they are market leaders in their sectors but I know for a fact that that they look over their shoulders at the LibreOffices and Pixelmators out there.
Anyway, much of this is a moot argument as we are seeing a movement toward all-in-one theme platforms that include every functionality most people will ever want and need… see themes like The7 and Arvada, to say nothing about the Wixs and WP.coms and SquareSpaces of the industry. SasS is the future for most and the present for some.
Case in point… we used to do tons of e-com sites with the WP platform and the Woo plugin. Now we partner with Shopify where we can create a better product for our clients without them having to make payments to a theme and a dozen plugin vendors. Shopify gives us a (small) piece of the $30/mo. action which helps our bottom line and the client gets first-rate support from a dedicated system-vendor.
Thanks for the insight.
From your perspective, would you like to see an option to be able to purchase support licenses for plugins on say a yearly, two year, or three-year, renewing schedule? For example, a web developer might sign a contract with a customer to handle support and updates on their website for three years. The developer then turns around and buys a support license on a plugin for three years, with the option to renew at the end.
Do you think that is that something that plugin developers should consider?
What do you think of the approach that LiquidWeb is taking in regards to Managed WooCommerce? https://www.liquidweb.com/blog/introducing-managed-woocommerce/
StudioPress has also taken a similar approach and offers WordPress Managed Hosting, where their themes are pre-installed:
https://www.studiopress.com/managed-wordpress-hosting/
Event Smart (a hosted event ticketing platform) is powered by Event Espresso and WordPress, with monthly and yearly pricing options.
I’ve heard rumors that The Events Calendar team is creating a hosted calendar solution.
Would you recommend that more plugin developers take steps to follow suit?
I just wanted to follow up with your statement:
Hmm. Can’t edit to fix the blockquotes….
Easy Digital Downloads is still a very solid option for selling digital downloads, so it is not like just because WooCommerce is the main e-commerce option, that other options can not exist.
Interesting discussion.
While I generally subscribe to the idea that WordPress product businesses should adopt an annual subscription model, I do see that a lot of potential customers may be turned off by that model and go elsewhere.
There’s talk about the need to educate customers on why sustainability is important, and while the arguments for sustainability make sense to me, I can see that the majority of customers are not going to care. I suspect some customers can be educated on this, but the majority won’t be swayed.
I suspect it goes something like this:
Business that use the annual subscription model will get less customers than if they had one time fees, etc. However, the customers they do get are those that understand the sustainability issue, and these are likely to be higher value and less demanding customers (ie the sort of customers you want).
Business that use the one time fee model have the ability to get a lot more customers – but these are likely to be lower value customers who are more demanding. I’m sure some businesses will find a way to operate sustainably in this space, but a higher percentage are likely to run into trouble.
Some customers who have bad experiences with one time fee models may become more open to the annual subscription model. Others will just keep on going back and trying the one time fee model, again and again. You probably don’t want these customers anyway.
In many ways I suspect it’s similar to the website development space (ie getting lots of clients who need $500 websites vs a few that need $50,000 websites). I suspect we’re facing that sort of dynamic in the product space too.
I’d still suggest that WordPress product businesses should adopt an annual subscription model, as long as they are getting enough customers to make their business sustainable.
Hi Stephen, i completely agree with you.
Customers will always look out to getting the cheapest way to do things and that is understandable but like you said they need to be educated on the issue of sustainability even though as you rightly pointed out most of them will not be swayed.
One time subscriptions are fine so long as the value is there, but if customers get to understand how fast things can change in this space then i believe they will begin to appreciate the need for the annual subscriptions.
I too agree with you, but I’m not sure that there are more customers looking for lifetime licenses, than customers understanding the need for annual fees. It’s been less than 1 year since we stopped selling lifetime licenses and we even rose prices. We didn’t see any decline in sales, the opposite, our growth remained steady.
I personally have seen a lot of additions to WordPress themes and plugins. Some creators of these themes and plugins do not even provide adequate support systems in place. Some coders are just not into marketing and branding their products. There is certainly a lot of competition in recent times. There are also a lot of duplicates of some themes. Be original and provide a unique difference and you are sure with time to start earning from your product.
I was recently having a conversation with another developer about this. Although most companies would prefer the annual subscription model to one-time fees, you need to look at what the consumer wants.
The consumers are the one who drive business so why not tailor a model to their needs. As a seasoned user of WordPress, I believe that companies need to build their model well.
Would most people want to pay an annual subscription for a product as against a one-time fee? Maybe but most of the clients I work with will prefer to pay one-time fees.
There are those who care about the security of their sites so they do not mind paying regular fees to get this service.
Companies should not only look at what they stand to gain when agreeing on which model to use but also pay strong attention to the customer.
You can’t sell what people don’t want or like (unless you are a monopoly.) People don’t like (or see the value in) recurring license fees.
I find that people believe that code should be warrantied for more than 12 months. If a new car comes with a 3-year warrantee why can’t new code?
I don’t know how the message of “Pay my yearly license fee for new features you don’t need and probably don’t want so that I can stay in business” will resonate. Maybe you can “educate” your client base but I rather doubt it.
How many yearly license fees do you think the average client is willing to pay each year? If he has ten plugins and each requires $50 will he pay the $500? Some will… but I think most won’t. People don’t do preventative maintenance on their cars or even their bodies! They wait until something ‘breaks’ and goes to the mechanic or the doctor to get it fixed. Yearly license fees are somewhat contrary to human nature.
Developers like our firm are going to seek out the most economical path for our small business clients and make them the offer of “Do you want the plugin that has 100 features, 90 of which you don’t need, for a yearly fee? Or do you want the plugin that is a one-off payment and does the ten things you want it to?”
I’ve found that 99% of the time there are several competitors in the same plugin sector. There are alternatives.
For years the web design sector charged retainer fees for web maintenance. The model didn’t work very well for a variety of reasons too long to detail here.
Maybe recurring license fees will work in the WP ecosystem but so far no one has made a compelling argument to convince me on the viability of the model.
All I hear is “Customers care about us” and “Customers should understand why we need fees” and “Customers should be educated” and lots of other “it’s all about me” rationalizations.
My experience of some forty-plus years in the software business (yeah, I started with Ross Perot’s EDS in 1974) is that customers don’t care about you or me, they care about their own bottom line. If you or I go out of business tomorrow they will have a new vendor the day after.
YMMV.
“If he has ten plugins and each requires $50 will he pay the $500?”
I find it hard to believe that a “business” will not pay $500 per year (about $42/month) towards their technology needs. They will pay about that even in a SasS environment. If they have a hard time with $50 / month expense item, are they really in business? If they just need a web presence why don’t they just use Facebook. What does it take to go and get on Facebook. My grandmother does that!
Also, with such a low budget, why do they need you? I am a client. I am not a plugin developer but it looks like you are a middleman who is not happy with his share. I have used shopfiy and woocommerce. I have paid for apps and plugins when I need to and I can budget fine. If I see too few updates, then I cancel my subscription. I can buy 10 plugins and pay 500/year or sign up with SasS and pay 40/month. I don’t see a big difference. The difference is the support that I get in each category.
“Case in point… we used to do tons of e-com sites with the WP platform and the Woo plugin. Now we partner with Shopify where we can create a better product for our clients without them having to make payments to a theme and a dozen plugin vendors. Shopify gives us a (small) piece of the $30/mo. action”
So a small piece of $30/month pays better or (is better) than “tons of e-com sites”? I can’t see it.
I see what plugin developers do. I know what Shopify does. I am still trying to figure out what you do for someone like me?
Al, your client base is likely much different than the client base of many of the people commenting here (and the client base I’ve had experience with). The fact of the matter is that if the subscription model did not work for helping a business remain sustainable, there would be a very small number of people using it. The reality is, its not an uncommon thing even in the larger software industry which is moving to a subscription based model for software (distributed, Saas or otherwise). I can assure you, if a smart business found the model was not working (i.e. the biggest reason customers aren’t buying or staying is because of the subscription) then that smart business will reconsider the model. To a large degree, I’m not seeing that happening.
It’s understandable that you’d be frustrated by this. But since you are a full stack developer and seem to vouch for a competent team on your company, there’s certainly nothing stopping you from building your own solutions for your clients and giving them bug fixes and security fixes for free on the software you build for your clients for a one-time fee. If the cost of subscription is a huge pain point for your customers, that could be an untapped market that you can get into! In fact, since many of the plugins/themes are GPL, you can EVEN use them as a base, fork them, and maintain them for your clients without even having to deal with these pesky businesses who want to charge you a renewal fee! I invite you to put your money where your mouth is 🙂
Good article, Scott.
The WordPress ecosystem is definitely maturing, with clear leaders in various product categories and service niches. While this can and does mean that certain “early producers” are now richer and more well-known, it is often the case that end-users are nonetheless clueless. Even if some “consumers” have seen a GoDaddy super bowl commercial (or even if one of Syed Balkhi’s websites comes up #1 for every SERP), end-users still don’t tend to have any clue in regard to the technical aspects of their website.
Every day, we at LittleBizzy come across a small business owner who’s been hosting their site at e.g. Bluehost for the past 10+ years who has never heard of e.g. WP Engine and other “early” or “better” managed WP hosts.
While market saturation in commodities can bring prices down, this doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of survival for producers; at the end of the day, you still have some % chance of being chosen. And, while startup products now have stiff competition, they are still selling specialized software that most end-users don’t understand well (at least, in the WP world). So, while a new rice farmer may have trouble selling rice in a crowded market, a new plugin or theme (etc) developer could in some ways sell his product just as easily as the big companies, sans head-to-head advertising wars, especially considering that these products are value-promising.
It could be a long discussion, but ultimately comes down to noobs.
And, while in years past the WP.org crew showed favoritism to their buddies and was rather full of spam/cronyism, I do think it’s evolved for the best in the past few years. Maintaining future competition in the market really will come down to the neutral and ethical approach of WP.org staff — including not overly catering to the whims of Automattic.
Plus, hundreds of free plugins are abandoned/banned every year.
Ultimately, WordPress has the opportunity to resist monopolies in online commerce for decades to come — imagine if Amazon bought out Shopify, for example — while empowering millions of small businesses to prosper and synergize together. Let’s hope “they” see the value in it.
“And, while in years past the WP.org crew showed favoritism to their buddies and was rather full of spam/cronyism, I do think it’s evolved for the best in the past few years. Maintaining future competition in the market really will come down to the neutral and ethical approach of WP.org staff — including not overly catering to the whims of Automattic.
Plus, hundreds of free plugins are abandoned/banned every year.”
Your comment is really critical and true. Bad money drives out good money. Bad ( read abandoned) plugins drive out good customers and developers.
The market for those of us who produce and maintain WordPress sites for clients has changed too, and continues to change. It takes constant work to stay on top of the evolving demands for website work. For me, one constant factor is that, from all appearances, I provide a considerably more responsible, ethical, businesslike arrangement than the majority of “website developers”. I find that I get a lot of ‘rescues’ — “A bunch of guys spent a year and a half building this site, and just informed us that they won’t support it any longer”. I know there are a lot of you like me out there, but it seems there are a WHOLE lot of the build-and-disappear type.
Hi Scott,
Great insights BUT I will disagree with you on the below lines:
“You can go after a niche, but WordPress is already a niche. A niche within a niche is a very small market.”
There are still many small “niche” (area’s) in WordPress/WooCommerce, Where there is still money can be made.
Thank you once again. I recently started with WooCommerce plugins and excited about the future.
Thank you