[WP plugins] Earn money with donations ?

Hi there !
Has anyone in here being succesffull by developping WP Plugins or Themes for free ?
I've been developping themes and plugins for a while and never get any cents via "buy my a coffee" cta ...
So if anyone has been succeeding this way I'd be glad to here about it ...
And anyway, if, as a WordPress user, you need a plugin that doesn't exists, suggest your thought and I might build it for free if I find the idea promising

As a WordPress user, I never donate to the free themes/plugins.

But, if you provide a better, full-featured, and paid version of your free theme, maybe I will buy it.

So in this case, maybe you should provide two versions. A free version and a paid version.

i do sometimes donate to devs of free good plugins, usually when I use it on all my sites. If i need an extra feature on top of the plugin, i reach to the developer with an offer.

But then i also donate every year to Wikipedia. All free quality content costs money and/or time, we should be supporting these efforts somehow or we will end up in a world where the entrypoint of an average Joe into IM or any business will be so high that we`ll only have a few gigantic corporations running business.

Hi guys,
Thanks for the replies, any advice is more than welcome !

imanseptian said:

As a WordPress user, I never donate to the free themes/plugins.

But, if you provide a better, full-featured, and paid version of your free theme, maybe I will buy it.

So in this case, maybe you should provide two versions. A free version and a paid version.

Click to expand...

I've been considering this but the fact to provide not fully featured plugins or themes annoys me ... WP is strong because of its community and I'd feel ashamed to make people pay to enjoy full experience of the product ...

In the same way I've never paid for a premium version of a plugin or theme : I'll never pay for that as I'll always be unsure of the quality of the final product (Just an example : I'm using yoast seo for free and on some projects my debug.log are full of errors ... I've been telling them and never had any answer (or totally irrelevant answers) ... Seeing this, I won't pay a dime for a premium version)

Einar said:

i do sometimes donate to devs of free good plugins, usually when I use it on all my sites. If i need an extra feature on top of the plugin, i reach to the developer with an offer.

But then i also donate every year to Wikipedia. All free quality content costs money and/or time, we should be supporting these efforts somehow or we will end up in a world where the entrypoint of an average Joe into IM or any business will be so high that we`ll only have a few gigantic corporations running business.

Click to expand...

I'm also donating to wikipedia and other projects ... And I hope it's still possible to do business this way ... But I'm quite skeptical ... That's why I'd like to know if someone is doing money using this long road !

Is not many people who donate. I have friend who tried to release many plugin for WP and did not make much from it and quality was good, has many active user.

Where is your cta located for the plugins/themes? Might be no one sees them?

There cta's that I find that work well are the notice ones that show up in the panel every so often or directly under the plugin itself where you can activate it, etc.

For themes, in the options, they generally have one where is very visible.

Besides that, if your work is good and you can make something useful as a free plugin and add premium functions in a paid version, it would go a long way to getting you more money.

Yes having free and pro version is best option. Donation not work well

blackh4t said:

Is not many people who donate. I have friend who tried to release many plugin for WP and did not make much from it and quality was good, has many active user.

Click to expand...

Yes I guess it's the case for many devs :/

Amphoric said:

Where is your cta located for the plugins/themes? Might be no one sees them?

There cta's that I find that work well are the notice ones that show up in the panel every so often or directly under the plugin itself where you can activate it, etc.

For themes, in the options, they generally have one where is very visible.

Besides that, if your work is good and you can make something useful as a free plugin and add premium functions in a paid version, it would go a long way to getting you more money.

Click to expand...

Everything is totally free by now so I haven't set any CTA ...
At first, I've been facing really boring and redundants tasks on my projects so I've developping my own stuff to avoid wasting time ... As things gets functionnal I've been releasing them for free without expectations.
But by now fact is some projects are becoming a bit popular so I'm just investigating as I know it can save countless hours of work to people looking for those particulars use cases ... But I won't do anything premium neither intrusive ...

Once again thanks for your feedback but I'm aware of the "Premium" way but clearly that's not the way I'd like to follow ... I might certainly change my pov the day I'll have 100 000 000 running installs but I hope not

So I guess I'll just put a cta somewhere and see how it goes ...

I don`t think the wp themes market is something that is worth pursuing atm with this free or free + premium model, as the market is pretty saturated and the main big boys like ThemeForest had tons of good premium themes, WordPress repository with tons of free themes and then you have the most used ones that everyone know, that everyone pushed through forums, affiliate links etc, like Astra, Divi etc..

But on the plugin market, I still think that as long as you offer some good free features and some very sought features for a premium upgrade, with the right marketing you`ll have success.

There are 2 categories of WP users that you can cater your plugin to.

The noob user who has no technical knowledge at all and is looking for a quick fix for ( sometimes an easy problem) but if you offer value and extra features that might be handy for him, it will be a win.

The professional / websites admin - entrepreneur who is a few levels down the success road, someone for example who is managing 20+ or 80+ WP sites and is looking for a solution to automate some stuff, maybe have all the features a backup plugin offers plus some more, all in a nice package that will cost a little less than the competition and offers a little more. ( That is also where you can go for a monthly subscription model )

That`s just an example, i`m sure you can think of many areas where you can go to, like eCommerce and all the hassle that comes with orders, invoicing etc etc etc