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Even with the limitations of a solo developer, and the obvious high degree of competition on WordPress, Is it possible to earn a passive income by making WordPress plugins? Or at least, Is it easy as all the hype on the internet makes it to be? If yes, then what’s your advice for a beginner to start?
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I think “passive” is a bit much.
* PHP updates
* WordPress updates
* Customer service
* Support
All of those have to happen for any plugin.
The biggest – and really only – place for plugins is via the wordpress.org plugin repository. Which are all free.
So, if you want to go there you’ll have to embed a freemium model.
If you want to bypass that you’ll have to sell yourself and/or some place like Themeforest. Which I imagine is harder to do as well as all the additional cost/effort in managing that.
The scale of your post-launch effort (updates, etc) will scale with the size of plugin. You invest a bunch of time up front to build a big thing and hope that you don’t have to do a lot of updates and support. Or, you do something small where the on-going costs are much lower.
So, I think the problem is finding the right type of plugin. What can you create that has high demand but relatively low effort to execute? Of the cuff I’m not sure that’s a very big pool to choose from.
But, it’s not impossible. And really depends on what your personal threshold is for “passive” and “income”.
I mean, how useful and unique is your plugin idea? How good of a dev are you?
If the answer to both is “very”, you’ll make money. If the answer to either is “not at all”, they you probably won’t make money.
Yes it’s possible. But highly unlikely. These days, the marketing of the plugin is significantly harder and more involved than writing a plugin.