What If Plugin Developers Could Actually Make a Living?

You find a plugin that does exactly what you need, check the reviews and build a client’s site around it.

Then you notice the date. Last updated: two years ago.

You check the support forum. Questions from six months ago. No responses. The developer vanished.

We tend to accept that people make free software and eventually stop maintaining it.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way?

I Wanted to Know How Bad It Really Was

So I pulled the data. 6,000 plugins from the WordPress.org directory, split into three groups: plugins that are 1-2 years old, 2-3 years old, and 3-4 years old.

The results were worse than I expected.

By year two, 55% of plugins haven’t been updated in over a year. By year three, that number holds steady. The plugins that make it past that point tend to keep going, but more than half never get there.

Here’s what’s interesting: the survivors almost always have one thing in common. They have a business model. A premium version. A SaaS component. Something that pays the bills.

Many abandoned plugins began as something one developer needed and decided to share. Keeping them working takes time they may no longer be able to give for free.

The Directory Wasn’t Designed for Sustainability

When you submit a plugin to WordPress.org, you agree to a set of guidelines. They’re well-intentioned. They protect users from dark patterns and aggressive upselling and bait-and-switch tactics.

But they also make it really, really hard to make money.

You can’t offer a payment-unlocked trial or lock features behind a license key, and there are limits on upgrade prompts. A free version has to be useful on its own. That can make it harder to sell the paid version.

The models that are allowed take work beyond the plugin. A freemium business needs a place to sell the paid version, payment handling and maintenance for both versions. SaaS needs a hosted service too.

For a company with resources, that’s fine. For a solo developer with a day job? It’s a wall.

So they do the math. Realize the economics don’t work. Stop maintaining the plugin. And the graveyard grows.

The Part That Surprised Me

Here’s what I didn’t expect to find: none of this is required by the GPL.

The Free Software Foundation (the people who created the GPL license that WordPress uses) are explicit about this. From their official position: “We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.”

And: “The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software.”

Read that again. The organization that invented the GPL says selling software is part of the definition of free software. Not a loophole. Not an exception. A defining feature.

The WordPress.org guidelines go above and beyond what the GPL requires. That’s a policy choice, not a license requirement.

Policy choices can be changed.

What I’d like to try

Picture a WordPress plugin directory where developers can actually make a living.

A plugin could offer a 14-day trial of premium features. Clear disclosure, graceful fallback to the free version when it ends. Users discover value before they pay. Developers get a conversion path that doesn’t require building a separate empire.

WordPress.org could facilitate payments directly. Take a cut, that’s fair. But handle the infrastructure so developers can focus on building, not on becoming e-commerce experts.

Discovery could actually work. Real curation. Editorial picks. A “new and noteworthy” section that surfaces quality work instead of just install counts. Give good plugins a fighting chance to find their audience.

When a developer is done, they could say so. “This plugin is looking for a new maintainer.” A graceful sunset instead of silent decay.

None of this is radical. None of it violates the GPL. Other platforms do it already.

This Is the Future I Want to Build

Open source already won. WordPress powers 40% of the web. The question isn’t whether open source works, it’s whether the people building it can sustain themselves doing it.

The answer should be yes.

The GPL and the Free Software Foundation both allow charging for software.

Right now, WordPress.org’s policies say no. But policies aren’t physics. They’re choices made by people, and people can make different choices.

55% plugin abandonment isn’t a law of nature. It’s the output of a system. We can design a different system.

One where open source and commercial sustainability aren’t enemies. Where a solo developer can build something great and not burn out maintaining it for free. Where users get plugins that actually get updated because someone’s getting paid to update them.

That’s not a fantasy. That’s just… how software should work.

Let’s make it happen.

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I want to hear from you. If you’ve abandoned a plugin, what pushed you over the edge? If you’ve kept one alive, how? If you’ve got ideas for how we fix this, let’s talk. This is a conversation, not a manifesto.

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The Data (For the Curious)

Source: WordPress.org Plugin Directory API v1.2
Sample: 6,000 plugins (2,000 per cohort)
Cohorts: 1-2 years old, 2-3 years old, 3-4 years old
Analysis date: December 8, 2025
Primary threshold: 12 months without update

Threshold	1-2 Years	2-3 Years	3-4 Years
6 months no update	62.6%	71.4%	71.1%
12 months no update	40.1%	55.0%	56.2%
24 months no update	0%	36.2%	42.1%

Average 3-4 year old plugin: 593 days since last update (over 1.5 years).

The survivors almost all have a way to fund the work: premium versions, SaaS services or companies maintaining them for their own use.

Analysis script available for replication.