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Plugin Pulse looks at three clear signals that the WordPress plugin economy is being reshaped in real time: one WooCommerce shop is giving away its core plugins and betting the business on expertise and services instead of code sales, a popular visual builder is facing pushback over a license that can simply stop working when the key expires, and a developer has quietly rebuilt the active-install growth charts WordPress.org removed four years ago so the rest of us can finally see whether our products are actually moving.
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The Weeks Discussions:
Welcome back to Plugin Pulse. The WordPress plugin world is moving faster than the usual release notes suggest. This week we are watching a clear shift in how money gets made, how risk gets priced, and how developers get the data they need to stay in the game.
We start with a WooCommerce company that just made its core plugins free and is now selling expertise instead of features. Then we look at a license model that can turn a purchased tool into a rented one overnight. And we close with a free dashboard that finally brings back the growth charts WordPress.org took away four years ago. Three different angles, one underlying story: the rules of the plugin economy are being rewritten in public.
WordPress Drama:
WordPress News and Items:
New Plugin Model Emerging: Free Code, Paid Expertise
Jessie Risch and the team at Woosa just flipped the traditional WooCommerce plugin script. In a letter to the community they announced that their dropshipping and marketplace plugins are now free forever—no feature gates, no site limits, no upsells. Full access for anyone who wants them. The move sits on the back of a clear market shift: AI has made it trivial to spin up basic plugin code, plugin revenue has been sliding hard for many shops (Woosa itself went from a peak €70k month down to roughly €15k MRR), and pure product sales look increasingly fragile.
Instead of fighting that tide they are using the free plugins as a top-of-funnel. Early numbers from the first full week after the change: 40 unique downloads, three calls booked, and two deals closed (€480 one-time plus €75 monthly). Their email sequence only went live mid-week, so the pipeline is still warming up. The real bet is downstream—WooCommerce support retainers, speed work, and especially Woosa Payments (their Adyen-powered gateway). Free software gets the relationship started; the revenue comes from the ongoing expertise of people who actually know how to keep a Woo store fast, stable, and converting.
This feels like the early edge of a broader model. When the code itself becomes a commodity, the scarce resource is the developer’s judgment, support muscle, and ability to sit closer to the merchant’s actual revenue. Woosa is also floating The Woosa Collective—an invitation for agencies, other plugin makers, and specialists to take a profit share in exchange for helping grow the ecosystem. Early uptake on the Collective side has been quiet, but the direction is clear: stop selling the plugin and start selling the people who make the plugin (and the store) actually work.
Summary
Woosa is giving away its core dropshipping and marketplace plugins for free and shifting the commercial center of gravity to expertise, support, and payments. Early results already show downloads turning into paid conversations. It is a practical response to AI-driven commoditization of plugin code and a possible template for other WordPress/WooCommerce product businesses that want to stay independent.
Further links
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Jessie’s original X update with the first-week numbers: https://x.com/jessie_risch/status/2076702061492645960
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Full letter to the WooCommerce community: https://www.woosa.com/blog/a-letter-to-the-woocommerce-community/
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Free plugins download page: https://www.woosa.com/woocommerce-plugins/all/
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Woosa Discord community: https://discord.gg/djqraxNhXq
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About Woosa / Collective framing: https://www.woosa.com/about-us/
WordPress Best Practices:
WP Rankings V2: The Active-Install Growth Charts Are Back
Four years after WordPress.org quietly removed the active-install growth charts from plugin pages (citing “insufficient data obfuscation”), a plugin developer has rebuilt them from scratch. The new free site, wp-rankings.com, launches as a public beta with four years of daily public data scraped and processed into usable signals. Growth charts now cover 30-day, 90-day, and 1-year windows for every plugin. Instead of the vague public buckets (“10,000+”), it estimates a more precise number inside those buckets and attaches a confidence rating so you can actually see movement. It also labels each plugin’s momentum (growing, slowing, declining, plateaued, mature) and shows how many installs sit between the current estimate and the next milestone.
Beyond the charts the dashboard adds free keyword rankings, basic competitor comparison, support-trend signals, review aggregates, and an ecosystem health index that shows which niches are expanding or fading. Everything is clearly marked as an estimate—the author has no access to the Foundation’s raw numbers—but four years of consistent daily collection gets close enough to be useful for the vast majority of plugin authors who lost their only growth signal in 2022. The site is free, requires no signup for the core views, and the creator is actively asking for feedback from other developers. Early Reddit reaction in r/WordpressPlugins has been positive, with people simply glad the charts exist again and offering small technical notes rather than pushback.
This is the practical tool many plugin makers have been missing: a daily, independent view of whether their product is actually gaining or losing ground without having to reverse-engineer the popular plugins list every morning.
Summary
wp-rankings.com restores the active-install growth charts that WordPress.org removed in 2022, adds install estimates with confidence scores, momentum labels, and basic competitive tools—all free and built from four years of public data. The launch post and early discussion treat it as a welcome community resource rather than a commercial product.
Further links
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Main site: https://wp-rankings.com/
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About / origin story: https://wp-rankings.com/about/
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Full plugin rankings: https://wp-rankings.com/plugins/
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Ecosystem statistics: https://wp-rankings.com/statistics/
Plugin Reviews
Plugin 1
Describr
The Lowdown:
Found it on Redit and he reached out again there amber did a deep dive into it on this show https://wppluginsatoz.com/wpplugins-atoz-where-every-plugin-has-its-place-in-your-wordpress-universe/
Describr is the best community and user profile plugin for WordPress. Describr makes it easy to create beautiful user profiles on the front end. Describr makes it easy for you to create websites where users can have front-end profiles.
Major Features:
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Front-end user profiles.
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Front-end account page.
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Allows you to create capabilities, grant/deny capabilities to user roles, and delete user roles.
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Allows you to grant users having specific roles the capability to delete their accounts on the front end.
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Allows you to restrict content on user profiles using user roles.
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Allows you to choose the fields that are shown on user profiles and the account page.
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Allows you to activate or deactivate users.
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Allows you to set Default User Status.
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Allows you to change users’ status.
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Allows you to force users to confirm their accounts.
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Adds password field to registration form.
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Email notifications.
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Users can send messages to each other.
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Users can block other users.
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Users can upload profile photos.
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Users can grant access to their profiles to specific set of users.
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Shows author posts & comments on user profiles.
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Extensible with many filters and actions.
See the structure of the URLs used to locate user profiles and account page on the front end here.
PS: If a feature does not work properly, report it at our support page, and we will fix the issue as soon as possible.
Rating: 5 Dragons 🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉
Some SEO Stuff:
Some SEO info for the new LLMs.txt standard:
AI Stuff:
Small Guys People to follow on X:
V for V for the show
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Security Stuff:
Privacy Stuff:
Coding Tips:
This Shows Featured Promotion
Every show I will be promoting a premium plugin or service I think might be useful for everyone. There is no affiliate links to them unless mentioned. This is just to bring more attention to underknown premium plugins or services that I believe can be of benefit.
This week the Feature is:
Cnew feature
The Lowdown:
Plugin Reviews
Plugin 2
Doing it live Secondary Plugin:
plugin
The Lowdown:
Rating: 5 Dragons We will see how it works out to how many Dragons
Educational:
Tip of The Day:
Satirical game on the realities of running a plugin business [FREE]
Link straight to the Game https://pressword.games/games/install-clicker/
Warning it mildly addictive…
Satirical Take on Plugin Business Life + “Install Clicker” Game
In the early web days, we built, broke, and rebuilt things with a healthy dose of humor and grit—because running your own corner of the internet was equal parts pioneering adventure and chaotic reality. That spirit lives on in today’s WordPress plugin ecosystem, where developers juggle code, support, marketing, updates, and the endless “just one more feature” pull. A fresh satirical gem captures exactly that.
Satirical Game on the Realities of Running a Plugin Business [FREE]
Reddit discussion:
Straight to the Game: https://pressword.games/games/install-clicker/
Warning: It’s mildly addictive.
Quick Rundown & Review:
“Install Clicker” delivers a clever, tongue-in-cheek simulation of plugin business life. Click your way through installs, chase updates, wrangle support tickets, dodge scope creep, and navigate the highs and lows of trying to keep a product alive in the WP ecosystem. It satirizes the grind—revenue dips, feature requests, maintenance marathons—with just enough idle mechanics to keep you coming back “for one more cycle.”
Lightweight, browser-based, and free, it lands as both entertaining distraction and oddly therapeutic mirror. For plugin devs and agency folks, the humor hits close to home without being mean-spirited. It’s the kind of creative outlet that reminds us why we tinker: the satisfaction of a well-running site (or game) and the camaraderie in shared struggles. Perfect share for the community—could spark great interview stories or Tavern Talk reflections on sustainability, burnout, and the fun side of building in public.
This fits right alongside our recent infrastructure and security chats: the plugin world demands resilience, smart tools, and a sense of humor. Have you played Install Clicker? What part of the satire rang true (or hilariously exaggerated) for your plugin journey? Drop thoughts in the comments or bring them to an upcoming interview—we’re booking more developer and community conversations now. Keep shipping, keep laughing, and stay curious out there.
Pet Peeve This Week Or WP drama:
Upcoming Interviews and Available times:
Reminder that we have more interviews coming up in the coming weeks with more developers and community members https://wppluginsatoz.com/book-an-interview-on-wp-plugins-a-to-z-podcast/
Upcoming Interviews: Marcus Burnette on July 27
Available interview dates: Aug 24th and Sept 21, 2026.
Other Shows and places to get WP Info & Training
The WP Builds Podcast
WP Roads
WP-Tonic
Worlds Worst Web Developer
WP Mayor
wp Minute
The WP Week newsletter
Kitchensink WP
Show Summary
Episode 18 Summary TLDR –
