Do we do enough to support WordPress Plugin Developers?

by Web Design, Wordpress, WP Plugins

A while back the WordPress community use to be a bunch of coders that were all supporting themselves. One guy would create a nice plugin to manage most popular posts, another to manage social networking… Things were great and people helped each other. WOOHOO!

Although the golden years are now happening for the makers of WordPress (Automattic), the makers of the plugins and to a lesser extent themes are really the un-sung hero’s of the situation. These guys and girls have spent in some occasions many months and lots of their own money on creating a theme or plugin that will really, really help you.

Now that there are around 16million bloggers on WordPress.com and about 16million server installs of WordPress, plus the 30 odd million from Windows Live Spaces. All of this adds up to WordPress truly being the king of website creation tools. And this in part is half the problem.

Now that there are around 60 million users, you can be sure that 58million of those users are not coders, developers or front-end people – they are people like my mum, my granny and girlfriend. They have all chosen WordPress because it is so easy to use, the same reason why I have chosen to use WordPress as the basis of every website I have made for around 2 years now and probably the same reason you have been using it. If my mum can use it, then anybody can use it, as a maker of websites this is a great source of confidence.

Thanks to all of the plugin developers, WordPress and the odd free theme I am able to provide much more for the cash than I would have been able to do before. This has given me more time to get more clients that in turn will have a much more detailed and professional site.

Sounds great doesn’t it? We make more money, and can create much more complex sites.

But do we ever pay back the people that help us? I know from experience that No is the answer.

Ask yourself, when was the last time that you donated to a plugin maker? Or do you sit there saying “plugin makers only do it to get notoriety and that payment is enough“.

That might have been an OK attitude back in the glory days when WordPress was a coders playground, but now the common user types are:

1. resellers, people who blindly configure WordPress with a few plugins and make out they did it all to their customers
2. so-called “web developers” or “web specialists”, who cannot tell you the difference between a sub-directory and a sub-domain, let alone debug CSS
3. Rude or demanding users that expect both a free product and free support (instantly)
4. People who cannot code at all

You may think I am being nasty with my user choices here, but this is experience talking here.

When I first released Share and Follow (currently in the top 20 most popular plugins), I was lucky enough to have a few people make donations to the plugin. This was wonderful and made me want to do more to make the plugin better. However the more professional the plugin became the less I saw donations. In fact I got a lot of occasions where I was asked why I would need donations, or I would be asked if I could remove the donation button from the screen altogether so that they could sell it better to their clients.

The view from the trenches

It seems that I am not alone. Other plugin developers are also feeling the pain of supporting so many users who are incapable of doing anything for themselves. There are a couple of posts from Alex King (developer of many of the early plugins for WordPress), Open Source Motivations & It’s Not About Money or Gratitude that really go into detail about this issue and the lack of donations that have been derived from the community, and a higher and higher level of support needed for all of the customers. So much so that he started up a side company just to deal with premium support which is a paid for effort.

Others such as Dougal (one of the core developers of WordPress) or Deryk have openly stated that they have hardly if at all received a penny from donations for the plugin efforts that they have made, yet there is quite a few downloads and active users.

Personally I feel sorry for some of the plugin makers, such as Alex Rabe who makes the NextGen Gallery, who gets so many support questions per day that to really maintain his plugin he would have to make it a full time job. There are 16 new threads started on the support forum today (2nd jan 2011) and the day is only half way through.

All of these plugin makers also get requests for new functionality or for something to work slightly different for them than it currently does. Usually if these people making the requests were coders themselves they would be able to make the change and share it with the developer, or at least be able to resolve it themselves. However now that we have a different situation where the average user has no skills in that arena, there is a much heavier burden upon the plugin maker.

So, what’s the solution here?

I see that there can only be few different solutions

1. Automattic recognise and support the most busy and professional developers financially as they know that WordPress would not be as popular without all these free plugins
2. When we sell a website with a bunch of plugins pre-installed we consider tacking on £50 to the price that we will donate to the plugin makers. Basically 1 extra hour added on to the price of the bill to pay back the people that have saved you 1000′s of hours and made you look better
3. When we ask for changes or new features in a plugin, we also pledge a donation.
4. The plugin makers demand money for support or changes.
5. All plugins will find a way to monetize themselves usually by taking away functionality from the free versions to make it available in the Pro version only.

Do you see a better way?

What do you think?

Author: (13 Posts)

Andy Killen has been working exclusively with the web since 1994 when he was Intel's internet engineer for Europe. Today he runs his own company phat-reaction.com as well as is the CTO of Speckyboy and was also part of the Adobe Fireworks CS6 beta test team. When Andy is not busy making websites, themes and plugins or giving training on website performance, wordpress or node.js, he can be found enjoying life in Amsterdam.

  • http://www.thegirlinthecafe.com thegirlinthecafe

    I think a WordPress Plugin Store (like an App store for plugins) could be an idea. If you could buy a plugin for $3-4 (A try before you buy option would be nice) I am sure many people would be happy to pay.

    • Snetty

      I think that would be a great idea, keep the costs low and I think developers could actually make a decent living off basic plugins.

    • http://featurethem.com Angelee

      I’ll be one of those happy people! Yeah, at least a free trial will be great..

    • cedricn

      This WordPress Plugin Store is a good idea. It would be easy to plugin developers to receive a little bit money for their hard work. And overall, it should stimulate plugins developers.

    • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

      I like this idea very much, mixed in with a quality control aspect to plugin creation. Yes the free trial would be great, but also it would be nice to use something that is “certified” as a well made product.

      Incidentally there is talk of having a code check/certification process introduced to plugin creation on the wordpress idea’s forum.

    • http://find.brentshepherd.com Brent Shepherd

      This already exists in a similar incarnation – wpplugins.com

    • Johnathan

      Right ON!

      I think a marketplace would be the perfect solution.
      Something organized by automatic to market plugins and themes.

      Like you said, just like an app store.

    • http://www.words4theweb.co.uk Jane Howitt

      An excellent idea! Especially with a free trial.

    • http://www.eventespresso.com Seth Shoultes

      There is an WP plugin (app) store:
      http://wpplugins.com/

  • Snetty

    I’ll be the first of many to object to your “common user types”.

    There are many of us developers out there that recommend WordPress (or Joomla, or Lemonstand etc) simply because it’s a superior product than anything bespoke that the customers budget would allow for.

    You’ve written an interesting and enlightening article about something that a lot of your readers have no direct knowledge of, but are involved in nether the less. 4 lines where you allowed yourself to rage managed to alienate most of your visitors, disappointing to say the least.

    • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

      Simon,

      I think you miss out on quoted “2 million coders” as opposed to the “58 million” users.

      And quite honestly I get support requests from these user types all the time.

      I was trying to draw your attention to the fact that the average user does not have a clue about how wordpress works or how it is coded. And this number is growing every day.

      • Johnathan

        Andy,

        I totally get the point of your article and agree that some sort of marketplace can be the answer developers are looking for. Sadly though, if this were to happen I think the user count may take a hit.

        It is all the same to me. I guess you could say I am one of the users that knows just enough to be self efficient as far as installing and operating wordpress. I am an avid user of wordpress and rarely need any assistance with wordpress aside from the already provided “documentation”.

        I want to put an emphasis on “Documentation” , because the majority of people that have problems with wordpress simply don’t read any of it. I think this is where the complications begin.

        • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

          Very true, few people read the FAQ, or any of the other documentation. I’ve even made a full video to go with mine and still get questions about items that are clearly addressed there. However making the video has reduced my support questions by about 400% so was a great investment in getting the premium vimeo account at $59 so I could make videos of suitable lengths.

          Still, every day I get a hand full of direct contacts for support from my contact form from people, even though it states in 2 different places to use the support forum (not including the BIG button saying support).

  • http://www.psdmedia.es psdmedia

    A good way to monetize plugins is create premium accounts for advanced features.

  • http://freshfishdesign.co.uk/ FFD

    As a result of this article, I’ve donated to the authors of three plug-ins I use the most.

    An app store is a pretty good idea. I don’t have a problem paying for something that’s clearly worth money.

  • http://webdesign.onearmedgraphics.com Robbie

    Agree with Snetty. The article didn’t even need that section.

    Back to Plugins, I’d encourage more ‘nagware’ by developers, along with the low-price ‘app’ style pricing schema.

    I’d donate for around 20-30 plugins I commonly use & appreciate.

    PS anyone feeling donation-happy please consider the Queensland flood k.

  • http://blog.deobald.org/ Dominik

    One thought that crosses my mind every time I install a plugin:

    When asking for donations almost all plugin authors have a PayPal “Donate” button. No one ever clicks those. It means work (sign in to paypal, decide how much to donate, …).

    Some plugin authors have a amazon wishlist. That may even be worse. Now you don’t have to pick a number (amount of money), but an item.

    Why does nobody show flattr on his plugin configuration page? People just need to click once and everything’s done. I’m sure I would click.

    • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

      I’ve got a feeling from reading the FAQ that flattr relies on people using paypal to setup their flattr account.

  • VirtualFlavius

    The app store idea is interesting and would be easy to sell to users. It might require some creativity to protect that code though, due to wordpress’ open nature. Doing that might be a dangerous move.
    Another option, which could be more in the spirit of open source, is built-in support service infrastructure and paid plugin customization services. If Automattic builds this into wordpress, there would be much more development in the wordpress plugin scene and quality may increase as well.

  • http://www.freedomstudios.co.za Graham

    This is actually a really great article and is probably overdue. I think that people really do expect way too much from free plugin developers.

    I personally would never have the liberty to ask for quick changes or complain about a free plugin, I mean how can I? The plugin is free for cying out loud.

    I think that the suggestion from the WordPress development team stating that plugins should start building a core team to focus around a plugin is a great idea – that way there is continual development without the plugin dying because one developer got too busy.

    However, I also understand that most free plugin developers are never really rewarded – which is sad.

    On the flip side, I have bought some “premium” plugins that are totally inferior to a lot of free plugins out there. What is worse is that I have had poor support and most have not really been willing to hear suggestions.

    I am all for paying for a plugin, especially if it is one I am going to be using over and over again.

    If developers charged for plugins and included free upgrades that would be ideal in my opinion.

  • http://wilwaldon.com William Waldon

    An app store would be a great idea, I’d definitely pay for the plugins that I use. I like to give back to
    those that have helped me along the way.

    What about the people over at codecanyon? There are a bunch of premium plugins. I’m sure some of them make some money.

    I’d fully support an app store.

  • http://find.brentshepherd.com Brent Shepherd

    A friend and I are building something right now in the hope of offering a solution.

    At the moment it’s leaning toward a kickstarter like crowdfunding plugin that developers can install on their site. I’ve had some feedback from other plugin developers suggesting they would prefer a subscriptions model though so it may evolve into that before public release.

    Andy if you or anyone else reading this would like more info or to help out, please email brent at prospress dot org or use the Prospress.org contact form

  • http://bluemandala.com Deryk wenaus

    The only way something like this is going to succeed is if it’s dead simple. People don’t don’t because it’s extra work.

    Maybe as a community we need to implement a system that makes it easy to donate en masse to your favorite plugins on your site. For example one button to donate $10 total to five plugins. Donating would remove some basic nag on the back end or make the plugins white label. Some sort of API built into the plugins could be created so that plugin developers could easily opt into this system, but not be able to abuse it.

    Hooking this donation into social networks would also be cool, so when people donate they can feel proud, maybe they get a open source ambassador badge or something. Or they become a member of a club where they get premium support.

    It would probably be in Auttomatic’s best interest to join this as well, but I doubt they will.

    In the end I’m not sure any of this will really fly because I do get something in return for my plugins: lots of client work, and a good feeling of giving back to open source. But a few donations definitely can’t hurt.

    • http://www.speckygeek.com Pritam @ Specky Geek

      Hi Deryk, I guess it’s not the laziness, but the lack of interest. They get it for free so they think there is no need to pay. The worst part is some people ask for free support and some just promise to send contribution. Some of them will ask for you to “direct them in the right direction” because they are not afraid to get down to codes. Free support should not be expected.

  • http://subealweb.com David
  • Iván

    I aggred with the App Store and help to growth the culture of make donations to the developers who share his work free.

  • http://www.nuresponse.com nuResponse

    These are great points that you bring up here Andy. I think that a big part of the problem is that the 58 million users that you mention (non-coders) really don’t understand how Open Source works.

    I see 2 important points here:
    1. We keep the “Open Source” philosophy of WordPress Plugin Development alive… So developers can continue to help one another. (Let’s not forget how we got here.)

    2. The Developers (of these popular plugins) need a simple/easy way to monetize their efforts.

    I think the answer needs to address both of these points. If we switch to a premium model… The motivation for creating/sharing new plugins in the development community goes away (or at least is negatively impacted). However, the plugin developers that really shape WordPress, should be able to monetize their plugins.

    My suggestion is a “Central Feature Request Store”: Where well supported Free Plugins can take feature requests from a large community of users. A user votes by donating/pledging money for a feature request. When there’s enough votes (money), the developer can choose to add it. This helps the “Open Source Community” while still rewarding the developer.

    The key would be the users, if millions of users were using the system, it would be a win win.

    … what do you think?

  • http://www.hadeninteractive.com Rebecca Haden

    You’re absolutely right. I’m going to follow your suggestion #2 for free plug-ins, just as I budget for the paid ones.

    I’m forgiving you the scorn towards non-coders, but I do feel I have to point out that I’m very honest and informative about plug-ins with my clients, as are the designers I work with, whatever their level of skill with code.

  • http://trishacupra.com Trisha Cupra

    If it’s free, don’t expect support. Personally, I will never offer free support for free plugins I will create.

    If you want my time, you need to pay me money. And that’s what I expect to give in return for support I may need from other plugin developers.

    Developers aren’t running non-profit charities here to support people who are often making an income from their WP site.

  • http://jeffsayre.com/ Jeff Sayre

    Andy -

    Great post. About a year ago, I wrote something similar but specifically targeted to BuddyPress developers, How Can BuddyPress Developers Earn a Living?.

    My basic question was, How can plugin developers earn (part of) their living creating high-quality plugins without have to resort to consulting?

    I was a software consultant for 8 years, and whereas it was a fine way to earn a living, I am not interested in taking on clients again. I believe the work I do as a plugin developer should be sufficient to bring me a reasonable income stream without having to take on consulting gigs. This is no different than a theme designer getting paid directly for their work.

    For my newest, soon-to-be-released BuddyPress plugin (BP Privacy, I have created a paid support site as is within my rights under the GPL. It will be the only place where I will offer support.

    • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

      Jeff,

      After reading your article I can tell you that I am one of the plugin developers that can count on two fingers the amount of consulting jobs I have been offered. Maybe it’s because I am based in Holland, maybe it’s because of other reasons. Who knows.

      personally to monitize my plugin I offer a CDN upgrade where people can subscribe to it to get faster downloads and more icon sets. I expect to break even in about 4 months of making this live. So sometime this month. But this figure does not yet cover the cost of creating the icon sets or my programming time, only the cost of the website, CDN and vimeo plus account.

      I am moving my support from being free to paid for at the moment, but as I have paid work to do, that comes first.

      Of course with almost 190,000 and a 93.8% approval rating I’d like to focus on Share and Follow. I do have substantial plans for it, which all include some form of monetization, while maintain a free element to keep the user numbers up.

      And incidentally it seems that the buddypress plugin makers are at the raw end of the deal. It won awards last year for it’s stuff, but you & Deryk(mentioned in the post) the plugin makers for buddy press have really seen nothing from it in the way of donations.

      All of this is starting to make me think that we the plugin makers should have some sort of forum for us to meet and communicate on. In my mind this would be good if it was an invite only based thing…. never know could be made on buddy press :D

      • http://jeffsayre.com/ Jeff Sayre

        Andy -

        Thanks for the additional insights into your struggles to make ends meet with WP plugin development. I agree that a private, invite only plugin developers’ forum could be useful.

  • http://higher-music.com/ Jay

    You know, if I gave $10 to each developer of plugins that I feel are critical to my site, I would only be out $100 – Can you imagine if we all did this? I am going to start donating ASAP.

  • http://twitter.com/modemlooper modemlooper

    EEK! All these app store suggestions. Why is everyone jumping on the Apple app store closed garden bandwagon? We’re talking about the open web here. Having an official WordPress app store basically will cut out anyone who will not be accepted into it.

    I think the issue is people are used to getting the milk for free and when you take it away you will get a screaming baby. It’s bad enough already with free support requests.

    If you develop a quality them or plugin quite crying and charge for it. No one said you couldn’t. This will cut off the freeloaders who will never donate to you anyways. People who expect something for free are always the biggest complainers.

    • Johnathan

      @modemlooper ,
      I really don’t think an “app store” will make a major dent in user count. If a developer wants to give something away for free they could always do it on there own or if the store could let them set their own prices then $Free is always an option.

      You are right about the spoils of getting a lot for free when dealing with wordpress.

      Think about this though. Go to the repository and look at download counts. If the developer charged just .99 think of the money that he / she will have made and the motivation they would have to keep improving. I mean, most of the developers already do an awesome job, but give a ditch digger burger and fries along with that water and he will work harder and longer. (Not sure if that is even a proper analogy to use here, but I think it works lol)

      I don’t think anyone is “crying” , here. Open discussions like this is where improvements come from.

  • http://www.speckygeek.com Pritam @ Specky Geek

    If you are a plugin or theme developer, you often want to give it for free download in expectation of a regular flow of contribution. Later you realise not even 1% care to make a contribution. Most of them will only ask for support. The problem is with the licensing required for WP repositories. You are not allowed to ask money for support either. 10,000 downloads later for Jenny WP theme, all I have got is around $200.

    • http://share-and-follow.com andy killen

      Hey Pritam,

      After reading through the wordpress rules of conduct, I think you might be interested to understand that….

      WordPress don’t like you asking for cash for support on their forums, as they don’t want some sort of bidding war for fixes. However this does not apply to your own site.

      On your own site you can do what ever you like, so if you want to make it so that every support question costs $10 for you to answer, then that is fine.

      With that in mind you could just reply to support questions on the wordpress site “I only support things via my own site, any support on here is given by the wordpress community”, and of course on your theme’s admin pages, only link to your own site for support.

      You could of course take the Microsoft route: Support questions come at a price, but if it is proved that the question is about a not known bug, then the money is returned.

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  • http://www.netlabs.co.za Netlabs

    After all the work you put into your plugin your 4 lines of rage are more than welcome, hell I’ll even allow you 8 lines of rage.

    Your article is well though and I commend you for that.

    The open source nature of WordPress puts food on many tables, and not only are the plugins a way to allow us to provide first class solutions to our customers, but taking apart plugins and figuring how someone else did something is many times the best way to become a better coder yourself.

    What ever happens in future, we must never remove free accessibility to solutions from the equation.

    I think that the creation of a plugin should go hand in hand with a business plan. Maybe we as solutions providers, have been caught with our own passion.

    WordPress again are an prime example of how to embrace and monetize open source at the same time.

    But the times are changing and I see exiting times ahead.

    Your article went down splendid with my morning coffee, we need more discussions like this one.

    Regards

  • http://www.websimpology.com Maciek

    Great post. WP is a very successful Open source story indeed but the support, especially for plug-ins is another story – in my opinion something like AppStore for WP plug-ins would be a great solution and would encourage quality and ongoing support. Once again – very interesting article :)

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  • http://www.vertstudios.com Joseph McCullough

    There’s no such thing as a free lunch. What you’re experiencing is just a less-than-obvious cost of using open source applications. Someone somewhere is going to have their feelings hurt. The PHP contributers aren’t appreciated, the Apache contributers aren’t appreciated, the jQuery team isn’t appreciated, the WordPress team isn’t appreciated, plugin developers aren’t appreciated. People only appreciate what they value, and people only value what they sacrifice for…such as money.

  • http://shabushabu.eu Boris

    In my early days as a developer I wrote two popular add-ons for NextGEN Gallery. Together they have been downloaded around 150.000 times. The total amount of donations has been around EUR 50. To me that clearly shows that the donation route just doesn’t work.

    A while back I switched to a pay-for-support model with the result that I got flooded with support requests via my contact form or comments on the projects pages. People were just ignoring the pay-for-support forum and still expected support for free, so that didn’t really work neither.

    In the end I just stopped supporting the two plugins altogether. There hasn’t been an update to either NextGEN FlashViewer or NextGEN Imageflow in over a year and the last reports I got was that the plugins stopped working properly with WP 3.0.4.

    When I became a full-time developer I just couldn’t afford spending so much of my time on something that esentially only pays for one beer every two or three months, so the plugins had to go. It’s a shame really. They were my first plugins and I still feel attached to them.

    Now, I’ve started charging for my plugins (Buddyvents and Mapology). This has several benefits. I earn some money and am able to put time into my plugins and my users can expect first-class support for an excellent product.

    Charging a fee won’t work for every plugin, obviously, but if you find a niche then it can be the way forward.

    • http://share-and-follow.com/ Andy Killen

      Boris

      Thanks for sharing your pains also. On the contact form front, I have herd tell that using lots of auto-responders is the best route there. You have the choice then to say “see the support forum for help” or “the answer to your question is X, if you feel this has not answered your question then post it in the forum”, etc… that way you can cut down on your necessary actions.

      regards
      Andy

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  • http://www.devoxsols.com/ Enk.

    I really like your idea at point no.2 in solutions.
    I think We all should have taken action on this earlier, this is something we can do for Plugin Developers.
    of course they save us thousands of lines of code and time..

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_VTOQV7JHTF2L4YY3O3JOBZANNU Lance

    I was just googling for articles related to our recent dilemma of being de-listed by WordPress and found your article.  The funny thing is, we use Share & Follow and YES, I did make a donation.  But I only did so because I know  the pains of being a WordPress plugin developer.  

    Our post on our current battle with WordPress over our Store Locator Plus de-listing:
    http://www.cybersprocket.com/2011/blog/wordpress-plugins-charging-a-fee-is-not-gpl-compliant/

    One idea I am playing with, since WordPress is GPL and all the plugins listed on the site are GPL, is downloading all plugins that have been updated within the past 6 months & have at least 500 downloads and creating a “cream of the crop” WordPress Plugin Directory.     The concept would be to constantly pull on the most active & recently updated plugins and revamp the somewhat lame WordPress Extensions directory.   Add things like filters (updated within X days, has > Y downloads, author has > Z other plugins) and sorting (sort by ratings, days-old, etc.) and other ways to find truly useful plugins.

    We’d also add “pay first, then download” mechanisms for authors to invoke on their listings if they sign-on with our listing service & of course we’d also allow developers to list that got de-listed for some arcane reason or don’t comply with GPL (according to the WordPress interpretation of it).   It’s just an idea at this point, but WordPress has irked me enough lately to seriously consider coding this up over the summer.

    GPL can be a double-edge sword for WordPress in this case.  All  the content is free, as in freely copied & re-distributed.  Thank you GPL.

  • Paul

    If you are a WP theme developer and sell your themes bundled with plugins for a living them - I just dont’ see why you shouldn’t pay plugin royalities (1% – 5% on every theme sale) to those who spent time helping you.

  • Mathias54757

    You can check this support/helpdesk plugin as well  http://bit.ly/ndzQBi

  • http://twitter.com/CarloRizzante Carlo Rizzante

    Hi Andy,
    thanks for pointing this out. I do like the idea of an utopian World where people pay you back for your efforts even without the necessity to explain them, ‘cos they understood already. In real, I would ban the concept of money altogether and let everyone work for passion and love, but this would require a totally different set of culture, so let’s forget about.

    I totally agree with what you’re exposing along your article and, as a web designer who like playing with codes, I’ll do my part in supporting your category. Developing a plugin is a damn hard work, now a day as it was in the recent past. It deserves and calls for gratitude. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and frustration. I hope things will go better. Kindly.

  • http://twitter.com/simonvart Simon Vart

    I think price is not the issue here. A large number of people using plugins and customizing WP could give some. The idea would be to have a quick, easy way for micro-donation, and the best would be to insert it into WP. That’s a problem for everything granted for free on the net : i you give it, people will take it. To make some buck on gratitude, you have to use a very small window of attention, with a very convenient way. I don’t know how, something like paypal but more easy even.

    • Andy Killen

      Simon, 

      others have suggested Flatter as a micro-donation method, but again that requires a paypal account to be able to setup the flatter stuff.  

      Sadly bank transactions are so suitable for small amount. 

      the principle is good, I am yet to see the execution be easy.regards
      Andy

  • http://bacsoftwareconsulting.com/blog/ Boutros AbiChedid

    Right on the Mark with your tutorial. Users expect everything to be free (including support). I am with 
    the freemium idea of plugins. Plugin (and theme) developers should get paid something for their time.