Comments on: Pay for Plugins or Themes?

By: Jessie

Jessie — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:09:22 +0000

The fact of the matter is, if you want a plugin that is robust, easy to use, supported fully by the developer and will upgrade as WordPress does, then that’s more likely to happen if you pay something (either on the front end or on the back end).

Some ecommerce plugins (like our PG-CafePress and some of the Amazon and other affiliate plugins) do an affiliate ID rotation. That keeps the plugin free but allows us to recoup a tiny (and I do mean microscopic) amount of our Dev costs. (Of course, that works well since many of our users are shopkeepers and the rotation doesn’t affect them.)

But I doubt, unless there is something really revolutionary, anyone will accept a micropayment model. Not necessarily because they’re cheap, but I suspect that WP’ers don’t like change in general.

By: Angsuman Chakraborty

Angsuman Chakraborty — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:28:08 +0000

I have decided to make my Translator Pro plugin, based on the original WordPress Translator plugin, for pay only for several reasons:

1. Lot of development work went to make the plugin perfect, fixing all the defects, to fix pecularities of different translator engine to provide high quality machine translation and above all to implement lots of user requested features. Professional quality development does cost time & money.

2. I realized that the plugin will need to maintained for future versions of WordPress and to make it work with other plugins which often implement their features in non-standard ways. For example different plugins use the nice url features in different and often incompatible ways. I worked to make this plugin work with UTW as well as wp-email etc.

3. I want to provide high quality support for my plugins as well as free future upgrades and ensure that it always works seamlessly on all blogs, with other plugins and with future versions of WordPress. It isn’t always possible to solve all complex problems pro-bono.

What I offer in return is a feature rich plugin. It provides automatic machine translation of your blog in eight different languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. If you liked my previous translator plugin then you are going to love it. It is search engine optimized, supports WordPress widgets, uses nice permalinks, super-fast (cacheable), multi-paged translations and lots more. In short everything you need for your professional quality blog.

So far I am happy with the response.

By: WordPress Plugins Feature for August | blogHelper

WordPress Plugins Feature for August | blogHelper — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 18:32:00 +0000

[...] diggPressTruthfully, this plugin got my interest simply because it is the second plugin I’ve seen this couple of months that requires you to pay for a copy (a micropayments concept BloggingPro addressed earlier). It, however, is currently more expensive (US$19 vs. US$15) and provides less important functionality compared to the WP-Paypal plugin we saw in the last Feature installment. [...]

By: Rudd-O

Rudd-O — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 08:59:24 +0000

I went the other way with Turbocharged, preferring to bundle a ton of plugins and themes for $50. At less than a dollar for plugin, it’s a bargain.

The thing is, you may say “why charge for stuff that’s free on the Web?”. When the stuff has bugs, and needs fixing, bundling and quality control… that’s when it makes sense to purchase instead of download.

By: WordPress, Plugins and eCommerce … It’s Time to Get Serious! | ePublishingDaily.com

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:34:37 +0000

[...] David from BloggingPro started me thinking and the more I wrapped my head around it the more it made sense. [...]

By: David

David — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:33:28 +0000

It just seems like there are not many people donating. I, myself, have never donated or paid for any WordPress plugins. I have bought a theme before though, but that was to distribute it for free to the community…lol.

By: Michele

Michele — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 07:37:17 +0000

Paypal style donations are one thing, but actually paying for plugins wouldn’t really work for me, as I tend to download a lot more plugins than I actually end up using permanently.

By: bd

bd — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 22:03:43 +0000

Perhaps it’s just me, but 2USD is not micropayment. 0.01USD is. Micropayment ends where people would bend down, pick it up and put it in der wallet if they were to find it laying on the street.

By: WordPress Plugins Feature: July | blogHelper

WordPress Plugins Feature: July | blogHelper — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 18:27:54 +0000

[...] Ironically, this WP-Paypal plugin isn’t free. When David over at Blogging Pro talked about micropayments for WP plugins, this was probably what he was talking about (though he suggested much, much smaller payments than what WP-Paypal costs). [...]

By: SN

SN — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 17:58:31 +0000

I agree with you, every effort has to be compensated in some measure. Every plugin creator these days is compensated by name, fame and more visits to his blog!

Sure this does not pay for his bills, but if wordpress were to shift to a pay/per use model then the popularity would immediately fade away! MT faced this problem long time ago and WP then had profitted from it.