How to sell plugins on WordPress.org and get away with it

[Ryan]

The following is a tutorial on how to trick the WordPress.org people into thinking you are giving back to the community whilst making your millions by selling plugins in their plugin repository.

1. Create free plugin
2. Add it to the official repository
3. Leave it sitting there for a while
4. and a little longer
5. Decide it's not very popular, so don't bother updating it
6. Wait till people start enquiring about purchasing your plugin
7. Tell them it's not for sale
8. When they reply saying that they REALLY want to purchase your software on their site, tell them that it is definitely not for sale, and that they can download it from the repository for free anyway.
9. When they tell you they don't want a free version, they want to pay for it because as we all know, when you pay for something it is of course better, just tell them that they could pay you for it, but that you don't really see the point since you would just be giving them the same version anyway ...
10. Briefly argue with them via email about the issue ...
11. Then decide "screw it", and charge them US$100 and email them a copy you just downloaded from the repository

This happened to me recently. I can't believe I couldn't convince the guy that he was getting exactly the same crappy plugin regardless of if he paid for it or not. He kept ranting about having heard bad things about the quality of the plugins in the respository and how he really wanted to make sure he had the best quality plugins around and so wanted to make sure he had a good quality copy directly from the developer rather than the cheap "freebie" version.

Just thought I'd share that story with you all. I'm not sure the amount of arguing over the stupidity of purchasing a free plugin was worth the hassle for US$100, but at least it wasn't a total waste.

He seems happy.


And yes, I did try EXTREMELY hard to explain the stupidity of this. He didn't seem to care/understand, hence I charged him for my time emailing him to and fro downloading it for him.

[mfields]

WOW!!! Great story, thanks for sharing and congrats on your US$100 :) I guess some people just don't want to listen.

[Ryan]

He was also interested in purchasing a license deal from me so that he could on sell it to his business friends.

IIRC, after pointing him towards the GPL license agreement he said he'd need to get legal people to look at it first or something, or maybe it was a legal advisor ... basically he was going to get someone to look into it to see if it is okay for him to onsell the software.

Oh, and he didn't know what WordPress was either. I had to explain that to him as well. I don't think he fully understood, as he seemed to think he was purchasing a CMS from me which worked with WordPress. I think he thought WordPress was something developed to work with my plugin, rather than the other way around, but I'm not quite sure. Most of his responses in regards to this were unintelligible.

[KnxDT]

Could you recommend us to him to buy another (paid) plugins? Hahaha, nice story :D

[Remkus]

LOL.. too funny :)

[andrea_r]

Oh my. headache inducing....

but hey, a hundred bucks for your trouble..

[Cristi]

Hahaha ... yeah... Normally these kind of clients aren't so forthcoming with their money :)

[Ryan]

Oh, and to add to this, the plugin was only compatible with WordPress 2.7. I pointed this out, but he didn't seem to think it would matter as he said he'd just use that version. He said he wouldn't have security problems because he his computer guy was real good.

[MiroslavGlavic]

Please send him to me. I need to buy a $100 tie

[Jeffro]

Wow. He said he would just use WordPress 2.7 to use that one plugin? Sounds like someone you'll never win an argument with. Hope nothing bad happens to his site. He might come back to you and pay you more money to fix it :)