I know this is a very controversial topic but I’m coming from a thread where this was talked about and i’m a bit perplexed.
Everyone hates SaSS because yeah … you have to pay monthly or yearly or what not bu, on the other spectrum no one is really going to do this work for absolutely free.
So what’s the best way to go about this. Is one time payment feasible ?
Let’s say i create a plugin and ask for $50 for it and offer 1yr of free updates and support. Well considering the medium PHP Development salary in the US which is \~$100-125k you would have to sell said plugin in order to really afford to live off this and offer the support and fixes users need about 2000-2500 licenses (which is HUGE to convince 2500 people to buy something off you). Another problem is also the fact that you would have to continuously do this year over year because from all i’ve heard retention is about 7-10% so basically after a year you lose 90% of the people who bought it.
The second thing is what do you do after that year ? what happens if a leak is found in an older 2-3 year old version of the plugin ? do you offer users a fix for that or just not care about it ?
The third one is reputation, if you just don’t care about old versions of software it’s absolutely normal that at some point that becomes obsolete and hackable, and basically you’ll also have people leaving you reviews that they got hacked “because of you” off a 3-4-5 year old software. So here i’m a bit stressed by this not nearly as much about reputation but because of the fact that you leave broken and hackable software in the wild which is not cool
As i do have a plugin i’m trying to sell i have yet to convince anyone to buy a copy off me yet, but that’s another topic on it’s own, at this rate SaSS seems the better way to go because at least once you convinced someone to pay that $50 / year you’re set for about 2-3 years (from what i’ve read that’s a normal retention of a user on a SaSS) and the churn rate is much higher at about 30%.
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What do you guys think, what would be the best way to sell a plugin ? Please be reasonable, as i said, no one in their right state of mind will offer any software for free without a premium after it (at least not a software that matters because i do have some plugins i offer 100% free with 100% of their features because they just don’t matter and don’t have much code in them to maintain)
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