Day: June 3, 2021

The purpose of our GPL Cellar plugin is to not undermine the efforts of developers, instead our plugin hopes to help them by making our customers aware of plugins and themes they never knew existed and eventually becoming a customer of theirs. “Say What!?” Yes, this will likely sound crazy to some of those reading this depending on what your belief is regarding the GPL license and development in general but let me first explain where I am coming from and hopefully you can see the benefits of using our plugin.

We all know WordPress is a great platform and its ever increasing market share that powers so many websites continues to grow and with such popularity a huge library of themes and plugins are available. I would argue a negative implication of WordPress’s popularity is the number of plugins that are available. There are literally thousands beyond thousands of plugins (58,664 according to WordPress.org as of June 3, 2021) hosted on WordPress’s plugin directory that you can choose from and the choices can be overwhelming when you want to enable simple features to a website. Search on the plugin directory for “contact form” and you will receive 49 pages of potential plugins to choose from. The great thing about the plugins here is, they are all freely available for you to use on any number of WordPress websites. Fantastic! The downside you will often times find is there are features you really need or think you might need, that are only available on the “Pro” plans of provided plugins. Bummer! So what do you end up doing next? We go back to our list of available plugins and find one that has a feature we need in their free version. We then rinse and repeat this process until we find exactly what we want, if we are lucky. Some times, I end up installing two very similar plugins because what was available in the “pro” version I could get in their free version, so in actuality the sums of two equal one whole. Crazy!

The madness of playing “plugin roulette” had to stop for me and eventually did because I was spending too much time trying to find the right match of plugins to use for my next project. I started dishing out the money and paying for premium plugins know that if clients are paying me to build them a website then I can carry that cost over to my client. I can justify this to myself and clients because it’s no different than having a house built where it costs “X” amount for labor and “Y” amount for the materials. Given this model you can almost think about it as having an endless supply of money and having any premium plugin you want available because the cost will be passed along to the client who needs it. Am-I-right?! No.

I don’t just build websites for photographers and my clients range across all kinds of industries from restaurants, salons, lawyer offices, flower shops, car dealers, and any other kind of business you can think of so nearly every project involves me using a plugin I have never used let alone knew about. Even though I am passing along the cost to my end user I also need to be mindful of which plugins I use because I don’t want to recklessly add plugins all willy-nilly. Because I work with so many different customers their requirements are almost never the same and therefore I require such a vast array of plugins. As I said early on, there are so many plugins available for WordPress there are also a lot of premium plugins at our disposal. Often times I am experimenting with different plugins to see if they fit my requirements or don’t conflict with other plugins and break the site.

I applaud all of the developers who offer a free trial period for their product before committing to a purchase. THIS free trial is the correct way to go about offering WordPress plugins because it opens the door for so many more potential customers. Think about how many more sales could be made by giving customers an open look at your product.

What about the 30-day money back refunds? Often times you will find developers offering 30 day no questions asked refunds on their product. This might sound like a good option, and is one that should still be offered, but it is not a great option for a customer because I don’t want to go through the hassle of submitting payment information and then having to go through the troubles of requesting a refund. There’s no disputing a free trial period is a much better option than this. Depending on the payment processor, they will keep their transaction fees even if a refund is issued. If PayPal is being used they collect 2.9% + $0.30 cents from whatever the purchase price is so if a plugin costs $199 then PayPal collects $5.77 + $0.30. The customer will get his full $199 refunded but the developer has to eat $6.07 because PayPal is keeping the transaction fee from the original purchase.

We offer a free 7-day trial on our Pro plan because we want you to see for yourself exactly what you are getting and letting you decide if our product is right for you. A huge benefit to a service we provide is our customers get to try our product and thousands of other products we make available. Since I started using the GPL Plugin the number of plugins I have purchased has tripled, the amount of refunds I had to request are zero, and I feel like I have accumulated a solid set plugins I never would have otherwise purchased if I didn’t get to try them beforehand. The Oxygen Builder plugin is one example where I had to rush out and buy their unlimited license because I fell in love with it after using it and is now the ONLY page builder I recommend – I’m looking at you Elementor…

The Single Benefit of using GPL Cellar Plugin

You get to try any WordPress plugin and theme before you buy it.

Other Benefits

• A single plugin to unlock thousands of premium plugins.
• Try it before you buy it.
• Adds exposure to plugins.
• Adds additional exposure to developers.
• No risk.
• Experience the same exact plugins provided by developers.
• Saves money.
• Saves time.

Conclusion…

The single most important benefit of using a plugin like ours is you get to try any theme or plugin you want to see if it works as expected and meets the needs of your project. If you cannot realize the value of such, then our plugin is not for you.