Why SaaS is the Future of Monetization for WordPress Plugin WordPress Developers

There are many different payment models for WordPress plugins used on the market. Of these, perhaps the best is to adopt a ‘software as a service’ type business model, offering support and updates to the plugin for recurring payment.

That’s what the author of this article believes. Below he’ll present why SaaS is the future of WordPress plugins, and why monthly recurring payments are the best plan for most plugins.

Looking at the WordPress plugins market today, the most widely used monetization model is “support + unlimited premium updates”, for a period of a year. And if you want to keep getting updates and support, you’ll have to purchase a license for another year.

In fact, everyone is actually selling recurring-payments licenses but without the automated renewals. Developers don’t admit it, or probably do not acknowledge that, but that’s exactly what it is!

I’ve talked to dozens of fellow WordPress plugin developers about this topic, and once I tell them the “truth”, they suddenly start to feel a bit “silly” and question themselves why they don’t auto-renew, turning their products into WordPress SaaS like plugins.

We all hear how SaaS is a wonderful business model–so why don’t we try to leverage the SaaS’ model for our plugins? Well, most plugins are not exactly “Software as a Service”, but we sell software and provide support as a service with the license — which sounds close enough to me.

Read the full article: Why WordPress Plugin Developers Have to Start Thinking SaaS