Selling WordPress Plugins - 5 Lessons Learned in 5 Years

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It’s now been a little over 5 years since selling my first plugin. What a journey! Having recently crossed the $1M milestone, I feel like a wise Yoda, ready to share my plugin selling knowledge with the world.

Let’s dive right in!

  1. Build for existing demand.

When I first started, I tried doing plugins that I personally thought were cool or interesting. Unfortunately, just like in real life, trying to convince someone to buy something they haven’t even thought of is super hard - without saying how hard it is to even get them on your landing page in the first place.

What’s much easier (and more effective) than having a “genius idea” is to build for existing demand. Target a niche where existing plugins are doing well, but you feel like you can do a better job, either in terms of features or in terms of design.

  1. Plugins + Subscriptions = :heart:

This one is a tough one because it depends on your product and not all products are well suited for subscriptions.

Coming from Envato, I used to think subscriptions were all about recurring revenue, which you also got with lifetime products. What I didn’t realise was that they’re also about price anchoring and different target audiences.

Subscriptions allow you to offer a great price to users who are not ready to make a big investment just yet. And they provide a price anchor so you can sell lifetime deals for what they’re really worth.

  1. Have the best product!

This one sounds stupid, but the point is: If you cannot do something better than the best, don’t even bother!

I’ve had both successful and less successful plugins; the ones that really do well are those where you’re a class above the competition. The other ones? They’re a time sink.

  • 2 more lessons to follow. Let’s save the best for last!

How about you? What are the biggest things you learned or things you wish you knew when you first started?

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Absolutely loved your post, and big congrats again on the $1M milestone! Here’s my point of view, reflecting on my own journey over the years.

Solve your own pain, but validate it first.
Early on, I built tools I personally needed, thinking “If I need this, others will too.” And while that’s sometimes true, it’s easy to waste months building something too niche, or solving a problem no one’s searching for.
Now, I try to validate quickly — see what people are asking for on Reddit, support forums, Facebook groups… if the pain is real and recurring, that’s a green light. Basically, WPBay was born also from one of these needs of ours, the need to sell our plugins on a marketplace which is not declining and failing over time, but raising and increasing over time!

Distribution matters as much as the code.
I used to think good code sells itself. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Learning marketing — even just the basics of positioning, pricing psychology, onboarding, and SEO — changed everything. The plugins that took off were rarely the most complex ones; they were the ones that had clarity, trust, and discoverability baked in.

Build relationships, not just products.
This one took me time to truly grasp. Whether it’s community building (like what I’m doing with WPBay), friendship building (was I was doing with Stefan), getting feedback from early users, or just being active in the WordPress ecosystem, the human side of plugin development is just as valuable as the technical one!
Most people don’t just buy products and features; they buy from people they trust.

Can’t wait to see your final 2 lessons, this series is gold. Also curious: did you ever have a plugin you were sure would flop… but surprised you and became a winner? I also have some plugins I created in mind which fit this category.

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Thanks for sharing Szabi,

  • Bonus lesson: “The key factor for success – support”

This one I actually learned from @CodeRevolution - when I first started out, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about selling plugins.

And I distinctly remember reading an article of yours where you emphasized how important support is - for some reason, it really stuck with me. I think it was this one: https://coderevolution.ro/2018/12/28/2018-year-in-review-what-i-learned-from-selling-plugins-on-codecanyon/ - maybe you thought no one was reading those, but I definitely was :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

And many years later, it’s just as important as ever! Without good support, there’s no business. Some outside the industry imagine that you can just put up WordPress products for sale and forget about them, while the money keeps flowing in. Unfortunately, that’s far from how it works. With just a few bad reviews (and no good ones offsetting them), any plugin, theme, or business is toast. Excellent support, day after day, is essential.

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Oh, right! Support… is the most important “secret sauce” of them all.

Good point!

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  1. Lifetime plugin revenue / time spent calculation.
    When starting out on your plugin sales journey you may be working a job or have some kind of stable income. You may think “what if this product is a failure, what if nobody buys it?” or “is this really worth my time?”

What’s important to realise is that unlike working a job, selling a digital product brings in lifetime income, as each product can sell indefinitely. Thus any calculation has to start by looking at potential lifetime sales.

For example let’s say you sell a plugin or theme for $49 and you barely sell 1 piece each month (which is very low by all standards). In 5 years, that’s 49 * 12 * 5 = $2940. That’s not going to make you rich, but it’s a decent payday if you only worked on that plugin for a couple of weeks.

But this also highlights the other side of the same coin: it’s important to stay very mindful of the time you spend developing the product and not over-invest too early. If you spend only a couple of weeks working on a product, it’s all perfectly fine if it’s a (relative) failure. However if you just spent the better part of a year before realising nobody really wants it, that’s a relative disaster (as this Reddit poster realised too late Did I waste a year of my life developing a WordPress theme? : startups )

You should always start out small, and if your product is successful, just iterate and improve it afterwards. Reid Hoffman’s quote, “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” really hits the nail on the head of this one.

This is especially important when you’re just starting out and you don’t really have experience with what works and what the market wants.

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This days with the rise of AI is diffcult to find the right niche…

Sales are dropping like files for my plugins on Envato… and is impossible to tell the reason since the staff are made from idiots …

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Totally agree with this approach, especially the idea of thinking in terms of lifetime revenue rather than short-term results. I’ve seen many developers (myself included) hesitate because we’re used to trading time for money through freelance or full-time work. The mindset shift that comes with product development is huge: your work can keep earning long after you’ve stopped touching the code. If you created quality code, support requests will also be relatively low.

I’ve found that the sweet spot is validating fast and improving as you go. A rough MVP that solves even a small pain point can start getting traction, and from there, you’re building with user feedback rather than guessing. That also saves you from investing months into something the market didn’t ask for…

And yeah, that Reddit post is a tough read (I did not knew it before, thank you for sharing it), but a good reminder that shipping early isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about staying aligned with demand (and checking if there is a demand, in the first place).

Build small, ship fast, iterate often. Solid advice all around.

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:100: Very well said, that’s a great line - I have to remember it :slight_smile:

It’s definitely a challenge to keep adapting…

If you’re thinking about getting into a new niche, my suggestion would be to try something that goes well with subscriptions. For me that has been a game changer as it gives me some peace of mind knowing that revenue is there waiting to be collected yearly.

Such is the life of an entrepreneur, but at the end of the day, we have more job security than the average salaried worker :slight_smile:

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I hate the subscrition mode, I guess I am traumatiazed by what Envato did with Elements and how they destoryed what I worked for more than 16 years…

Current ly I switched to threejs/shaders/glsls is amazing what can be done with it no limits but difficult as f…, from 10 ddevelopers only 1 makes it in this fieeld, now with AI is easier but still you need to have a solid grasp of what is going on…

As for subscription we will see, we have it on wpbay and I will also have an optionn on my own wbsite for this, but somehow I still hate it :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I think you still need to understand what’s going on in the code, I don’t think you can “vibe code” your way to complex apps (or at least not yet).

AI is an amazing teacher though, super good at explaining things and infinitely patient. Where maybe we learned from some obscure docs or stackoverflow answer that was hard to find, someone getting started with programming today has it so easy and can just ask AI everything they want to know.

Great time to be a curious kid.

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I am a curious kid! :slight_smile:

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