- Feb 20, 2018
- 534
- 441
I thought I'd share my experience because I've been selling WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon since 2016 and I've had a front-row seat to a lot of the changes people have been discussing lately. So over the years I released more than 150 plugins if I count them all, sold over 16,000 licenses, generated over $650k in sales only on CodeCanyon. For a long time, CodeCanyon was an amazing platform, my growth was constant and steady, year after year, going up step by step. My strategy was simple, I built a good product, support it properly and people would come in and purchase it, without extra effort from my part. This was the nice part of selling on a large marketplace.
CodeCanyon's commission was ok-ish, from a 50$ plugin, they substract 5$ (as the buyer fee) and from the remaining, they substracted 12.5% (the condition for this percentage was to sell the product only on CodeCanyon, to be exclusive there). So, after fees, I would end up with 39$. From there I still had to pay taxes in my own country (an additional 15-20%). The remaining was my profit.
My job was to build products, support the customers, maintain existing plugins, write documentation and everything else that comes with running a software business.
These were years when I barely thought about marketing. I'd wake up, check sales, answer support tickets, work on the next plugin and repeat. On the top of the business, I had to do support tickets 10 hours a day, just to answer and solve all questions and issues which were coming from people. Also, new sales would come in while I was sleeping.
Also, I still remember the excitement of my first sales. I still remember my first sale. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it was the first time I realized that someone I had never met was willing to pay for something I had built. That was a powerful moment and it made me think that this could be multiplied 100x with the proper commitment.
I remember also the first month where I made more than my day job as a developer... This was already way after I realized this will become a full time business. Those were really exciting times.
What I didn't realize back then was how much I was relying on a single source of customers. When things are going well, you don't spend much time thinking about risk. You assume tomorrow will look a lot like today.
Then little things started changing, especially after 2024. Envato was sold to Shutterstock and their whole business changed, their goals changed (now they are focusing on Elements subscriptions) and left the Envato Market to die. After that moment, products that would have sold well a few years earlier struggled to gain sales.
If I could go back and give my 2016 self one piece of advice, it would be simple: don't just build products, build relationships. You will build nice products, but focus on the people who trust your work, they are the real long-term asset.
Also, Envato just announced that thy will change policies, they remove the exclusivity requirement and will add a flat 50% commission on each sale (instead of the 12.5% commission that they had before). This will kill the marketplace for good, as people will move away ASAP...
The reason I'm writing this is because I keep seeing people ask whether the WordPress market is dead, whether AI killed plugin sales or whether marketplaces still work. I did a manual email outreach to bunch of old customers and from what I've seen, the answer is clearly no.
The market isn't dead, but it is very different from what it was 5-10 years ago. Agencies I contacted are still buying, business owners are still buying, people are still building sites... the demand didn't disappear. What changed is that people are much less willing to buy "nice to have" plugins, they buy things that save time, make money, solve compliance problems, improve SEO and similar stuff.
Looking back, I wish I had spent more time building my own audience earlier, however, Envato limited me from doing this, as they don't share customer data... I needed to figure out a way to build my own email lists, communities, direct relationships with customers - those things become incredibly valuable over time. And also, because at the moment I did not feel the urgency of doing this, I was pretty lazy and did not do much of this part, when the time was right for it.
As a result, I gradually started moving more of my focus toward channels that I control directly. It took me much longer than it should have to realize the value of owning the relationship with the customer. I started my own WordPress plugin marketplace, where I give control over the seller-customer relationship and learn from what I would have needed when I was selling on CodeCanyon.
Over the years I also noticed that many talented WordPress developers were facing the same challenges like me, they wanted the visibility that a marketplace provides, but they also wanted ways to connect with customers.
Yes, I still think marketplaces have an important role, especially if they are built with the idea to help the developers sell their stuff, not just gain as much profit as possible from these transactions...
Many devs, myself included, wouldn't have achieved the same results without them.
CodeCanyon's commission was ok-ish, from a 50$ plugin, they substract 5$ (as the buyer fee) and from the remaining, they substracted 12.5% (the condition for this percentage was to sell the product only on CodeCanyon, to be exclusive there). So, after fees, I would end up with 39$. From there I still had to pay taxes in my own country (an additional 15-20%). The remaining was my profit.
My job was to build products, support the customers, maintain existing plugins, write documentation and everything else that comes with running a software business.
These were years when I barely thought about marketing. I'd wake up, check sales, answer support tickets, work on the next plugin and repeat. On the top of the business, I had to do support tickets 10 hours a day, just to answer and solve all questions and issues which were coming from people. Also, new sales would come in while I was sleeping.
Also, I still remember the excitement of my first sales. I still remember my first sale. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it was the first time I realized that someone I had never met was willing to pay for something I had built. That was a powerful moment and it made me think that this could be multiplied 100x with the proper commitment.
I remember also the first month where I made more than my day job as a developer... This was already way after I realized this will become a full time business. Those were really exciting times.
What I didn't realize back then was how much I was relying on a single source of customers. When things are going well, you don't spend much time thinking about risk. You assume tomorrow will look a lot like today.
Then little things started changing, especially after 2024. Envato was sold to Shutterstock and their whole business changed, their goals changed (now they are focusing on Elements subscriptions) and left the Envato Market to die. After that moment, products that would have sold well a few years earlier struggled to gain sales.
If I could go back and give my 2016 self one piece of advice, it would be simple: don't just build products, build relationships. You will build nice products, but focus on the people who trust your work, they are the real long-term asset.
Also, Envato just announced that thy will change policies, they remove the exclusivity requirement and will add a flat 50% commission on each sale (instead of the 12.5% commission that they had before). This will kill the marketplace for good, as people will move away ASAP...
The reason I'm writing this is because I keep seeing people ask whether the WordPress market is dead, whether AI killed plugin sales or whether marketplaces still work. I did a manual email outreach to bunch of old customers and from what I've seen, the answer is clearly no.
The market isn't dead, but it is very different from what it was 5-10 years ago. Agencies I contacted are still buying, business owners are still buying, people are still building sites... the demand didn't disappear. What changed is that people are much less willing to buy "nice to have" plugins, they buy things that save time, make money, solve compliance problems, improve SEO and similar stuff.
Looking back, I wish I had spent more time building my own audience earlier, however, Envato limited me from doing this, as they don't share customer data... I needed to figure out a way to build my own email lists, communities, direct relationships with customers - those things become incredibly valuable over time. And also, because at the moment I did not feel the urgency of doing this, I was pretty lazy and did not do much of this part, when the time was right for it.
As a result, I gradually started moving more of my focus toward channels that I control directly. It took me much longer than it should have to realize the value of owning the relationship with the customer. I started my own WordPress plugin marketplace, where I give control over the seller-customer relationship and learn from what I would have needed when I was selling on CodeCanyon.
Over the years I also noticed that many talented WordPress developers were facing the same challenges like me, they wanted the visibility that a marketplace provides, but they also wanted ways to connect with customers.
Yes, I still think marketplaces have an important role, especially if they are built with the idea to help the developers sell their stuff, not just gain as much profit as possible from these transactions...
Many devs, myself included, wouldn't have achieved the same results without them.
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