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I've authored commercial membership plugin memberwing a while ago. Total revenues including consulting fees and subsequent sale of it as a business (with more o

by gesman 11y ago

I've authored commercial membership plugin memberwing a while ago. Total revenues including consulting fees and subsequent sale of it as a business (with more of subsequent consulting) are in 6 figures. It's a good strategy of free version for promotion of commercial version although Wordress is strict in terms of how much you allowed to pimp your commercial stuff through their free plugins repository. If your plugin helps people to make money - price tag could be higher vs. utility plugins. To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts. Paypal is a popular payment processor to sell through although nothing prevents buyer from buying and then requesting refund next minute and Paypal will not always be on your side for digital products. I've created my own commercial license tracking system wrapped in encoded PHP that also warns about expiring license and asked for renewal. If buyer pulls "refund" trick on me - I've deactivated license remotely and that disabled plugin for offending customer. Consulting was a big source of revenues as some customers wanted to add this and that feature and some ended up paying $10,000-20,000 per lifetime for extras. This is pretty impressive considering that PHP is not exactly big money making skill.

lucaspiller 11y ago
I guess it's hard to tell, but do you have any ideas about how the licensing and encoding have helped your revenue? Have you had any customers unhappy that they weren't able to look at the source?
- gesman 11y ago
  Licensing helped to collect recurring fees from existing customers. Yearly "Maintenance" fee ~= 20% of initial license in my case. So it helped. Actually I welcomed curious customers to buy (for much higher, unpublished fee) fully open sourced version. Nowadays any PHP/wordpress plugin type of business is based on sand anyways just because $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything. I figured that its better to take the money if offered.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    > $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything. I doubt this very much. You get a bunch of half baked code that you now have to maintain.
kuschku 11y ago
And all it takes is one college kid a weekend to break your system. And you’ll lose more than half of your revenue stream.
- gesman 11y ago
  Yes, but it was enough to distract 99% of kiddies from copycatting it. 1% wasn't a threat to business. Just a sale that would never happen anyways.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    The issue is more that as soon as that one percent decrypts it, the source will be on piratebay within of just a few hours.
    - gesman 11y ago
      Yes. And also add to it - infested with malware injected by the one who added it. You grab the software via thepiratebay - and your site or your computer becomes a zombie. Lots of people know that and so that never been a threat to me. And then - cracked version got outdated pretty soon as well. On a final note - cracked copies actually worked as a free advertisement - in fact I contemplated to upload clean "cracked" version of my software to a few sites for that specific purpose. This helps business, rare hurts.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        That actually depends – many of the larger groups in piracy do not want to harm their reputation, and actually provide email support for their cracks, with guarantuee to be malware free. Sadly, especially in gaming, their support tends to work better than the official support, with some groups even providing fixes and patches for bugs existing in the official game. I own all the games that I play, but often, years after the activation servers have been shut down, the only solution is to use pirated versions.
        11y ago
devicenull 11y ago
> To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts. 100%? eval() is pretty commonly disabled for security reasons.

by gesman 11y ago

lucaspiller 11y ago

I guess it's hard to tell, but do you have any ideas about how the licensing and encoding have helped your revenue? Have you had any customers unhappy that they weren't able to look at the source?

gesman 11y ago
Licensing helped to collect recurring fees from existing customers. Yearly "Maintenance" fee ~= 20% of initial license in my case. So it helped. Actually I welcomed curious customers to buy (for much higher, unpublished fee) fully open sourced version. Nowadays any PHP/wordpress plugin type of business is based on sand anyways just because $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything. I figured that its better to take the money if offered.
- x5n1 11y ago
  > $500 on freelancer can get you really far in replicating pretty much anything. I doubt this very much. You get a bunch of half baked code that you now have to maintain.

kuschku 11y ago

And all it takes is one college kid a weekend to break your system. And you’ll lose more than half of your revenue stream.

gesman 11y ago
Yes, but it was enough to distract 99% of kiddies from copycatting it. 1% wasn't a threat to business. Just a sale that would never happen anyways.
- kuschku 11y ago
  The issue is more that as soon as that one percent decrypts it, the source will be on piratebay within of just a few hours.
  - gesman 11y ago
    Yes. And also add to it - infested with malware injected by the one who added it. You grab the software via thepiratebay - and your site or your computer becomes a zombie. Lots of people know that and so that never been a threat to me. And then - cracked version got outdated pretty soon as well. On a final note - cracked copies actually worked as a free advertisement - in fact I contemplated to upload clean "cracked" version of my software to a few sites for that specific purpose. This helps business, rare hurts.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      That actually depends – many of the larger groups in piracy do not want to harm their reputation, and actually provide email support for their cracks, with guarantuee to be malware free. Sadly, especially in gaming, their support tends to work better than the official support, with some groups even providing fixes and patches for bugs existing in the official game. I own all the games that I play, but often, years after the activation servers have been shut down, the only solution is to use pirated versions.
      - 11y ago

devicenull 11y ago

> To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts. 100%? eval() is pretty commonly disabled for security reasons.