Or, why the donation model is not a sustainable business for plugin developers!
You read the headline and you might think what a weird statement? Obviously this sound weird but from time to time we get questions like:
- There is free plugin XY which is doing similar like yours. Why aren’t your Add-Ons free?
- Can you send me plugin for free or convert your add-ons into donationware?
- I am using the free MashShare Share Buttons. So can you give me free help with customizing them?
Unfortunately the donation business model doesn’t work. Especially when you’re trying to provide support and maintain the project to keep it bug free and up-to-date. These requires man power and time which as you know doesn’t come for free.
If we’d like to keep maintaining the projects and provide support to our customers, we need to pay the bills. This is the only way we could keep it going. Donation business model is not actually to sustain the projects like these. They are more like for people who spend their free time into creating something for any reason then letting others to use it. This would mean the project could easily go out of date and there is no professional support. Support is usually driven by community rather than the developer or the company who produces the product.
Products related to social media must be kept up to date or they could go out of date very, very easy. Which is why we can’t provide many add-ons for free.
However, we do our best to provide Mashshare plugin for free which is the base of our add-ons.
Authors: Ilgit Yildirim, René Hermenau
