[wp-hackers] Making money from GPL plugin development (Was: Advertising on plugin pages)

[Nathan Rice]

Peter, I hear ya ...
... but you do at least admit that supporting your own products is a losing
game if you make good products, and you have to resort to supporting other
people's code, and/or selling your coding services.


My Website
http://www.nathanrice.net/

My Twitter
http://twitter.com/nathanrice


On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Peter Westwood <peter.westwood at ftwr.co.uk>wrote:

>
> On 1 Mar 2009, at 21:50, Nathan Rice wrote:
>
>> In the "give it away, charge for support" model, if you write an easy to
>> use, user friendly program/plugin/theme, you're undercutting your own
>> profits.
>> Whereas when you charge for the product, and give the support away for
>> free,
>> then you have a greater incentive to write easy to use code in the first
>> place.
>>
>> It would seem that the best way to make the most money is to write a
>> program
>> that is very useful and in high demand, but make sure that you don't make
>> it
>> so easy to use that you end up making support unnecessary.  It's almost
>> like
>> you have to purposefully inferior product in order to get a decent return.
>>
>>
> You don't have to only support your own plugins/themes.
>
> To turn you argument on it's head:
>
> By writing easy to use, user friendly products (plugins/themes) you are
> saying to your potential customer here is a can do person who solves
> problems in a user friendly way and understands my needs.  This is the sort
> of person who will be able to solve my problem with that overly complicated
> / poorly written plugin/theme that I am having trouble getting working _or_
> this is the person I want to employ to develop my new high revenue site.
>
> If you can show that you are capable, people will be willing to pay for
> your services.
>
> In my personal opinion:
>
> If you want to make money in the open-source world then you need to think
> of the code you give away for free, and the community interaction you make
> as an on-going job interview.
>
> Show your potential customers the benefits you can give them.
>
>
> westi
> --
> Peter Westwood
> http://blog.ftwr.co.uk | http://westi.wordpress.com
> C53C F8FC 8796 8508 88D6 C950 54F4 5DCD A834 01C5
>
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