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.

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.

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.

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.

I would consider that perhaps if WordPress was not in itself a free download then there would be more scope for payment or micropayments for development of themes or plugins

I do get slightly annoyed when someone asks me if I can help them make on my themes look like the NY Times website or such nonsense.

If you need a professional design for your professional site, then get a professional. I am not.

Since people donate, I wouldn’t think of mandating a charge for my themes. Also, WP themes have to be GNU-GPL license compatible in order to use the WP API.

However, I also think that it would not work at all.
Imagine every plugin author would charge you $2 USD per download. No chance to test the plugin prior paying & usage. That will never ever work. Also, I am not willing to pay for a plugin that I have never evaluated before. I have used several plugins that did not work for some reasons, so why paying for such plugins without knowing that they will work on my blog?

To follow up on what CrabApple said, the price of the theme or plugin would have to be small enough for me clearly say that the value of the theme/plugin far outweighs the minor fee for using it. I’d much rather see theme and plugin developers have an option for donating, rather than forcing a payment. If I use something I couldn’t live without, I’m more likely to donate $10-20 to “the cause” rather than being forced to pay $5. If the payment is too much I’d likely try my hand at developing my own plugin or theme.

Currently, most of the plugins out there are not “I have to have this plugin to survive” and some of the themes are amazing looking, but lets face it, they are still just themes.

There are plugins that I’m surprised don’t charge. Akismet comes to mind here.

I envision “Pay” themes being professional themes that allow you to create a website that is more than just a blog. A site to sell shareware or a podcast studio site like twit.tv’s new look.

Most of the themes out there now, great looking as they are, are just blog themes. For blogging, I’m pretty content with using what comes with WP.

Well, would you? I wonder what would happen if some of my favorite plugins went to a pay-to-upgrade model. I don’t think I’d be using them, myself….

To be honest, I don’t think that it would work for WordPress. People are used to the fact that they can get their themes and plugins at no extra cost, and that’s a good thing too. If someone comes up with a theme for money, chances are that you can find a similar (or even better) theme for free.

So there’s this micropayment thing, like 5$ for a theme or plugin. But even with this small amount of money, that specific thing needs to be exceptional, must offer something the vast majority doesn’t have Akismet is such a plugin.

I don’t think that some paid themes or plugins wouldn’t hurt the community at all. But they won’t be a success either. So, to give a short answer: Yes, for WordPress it’s too late. And that’s a good thing!