What seven free plugins cost, and what they pay back
Free plugins on WordPress.org are not marketing, whatever the growth posts say. They are a product with support obligations, a public review page, and a genuinely useful return.
I maintain seven plugins on WordPress.org. None of them charges anything. Together they run on somewhere north of sixteen thousand active sites, which is both a nice number and a standing obligation I did not fully appreciate when I published the first one.
They fall into two categories
Some exist because our themes need them: currency switching, Stripe checkout, PayPal checkout for property submissions. Those are companions: they solve a problem for a customer who already bought something, and shipping them free is simply part of the product being complete.
The others are standalone. FAQs, testimonials, star ratings on comments, post metadata. Those started as things I built once for a project and got tired of rebuilding.
What they actually cost
- Support in public. The forum is indexed, permanent, and the person asking is not a customer. They are still owed an answer.
- The review page. One frustrated one-star sits at the top of your listing for a long time, and often it is about a hosting limitation you cannot fix.
- Compatibility, forever. Every WordPress release, every PHP bump, on code that generates no revenue and cannot be quietly discontinued without leaving thousands of sites stranded.
Free does not mean low commitment. It means the commitment is not funded.
What they pay back
Not leads, mostly; the growth-hack version of this story is largely a myth in my experience. What they actually return is harder to put in a spreadsheet and more useful.
They are a testing ground across an absurd diversity of servers. A plugin on ten thousand sites finds edge cases that no amount of local testing will produce, and those lessons flow straight back into the premium products. Half of what I know about defensive WordPress code came from free-plugin bug reports.
They are also proof of work. A prospective customer evaluating a theme can read my code, my changelog, and how I answer someone having a bad day. That is worth more than any feature list.
Would I publish more
Carefully. The rule I now apply: only publish something I would still be willing to maintain if it got popular and I got nothing for it. Everything I have shipped passes that test. A few things I have written did not, and they stayed on my own machine.