Free vs Premium

I just updated my WordPress plugins. The oldest one, Category Posts in Custom Menu, dates from when Appearance > Menus was literally called Custom Menus. What it does is expand a category into its posts. Hence the name of the plugin. So, if you have a category "Travel stories", your menu will show the actual stories themselves, such as your blog post titled "Kyoto sightseeing".

Later, I also adopted a plugin titled Auto Submenu and adapted it to the Customizer and lately also to the Gutenberg Block Editor. And lastly I created Logo Per Page, a way to show a different logo on each page of your website.

If I have another idea for a WordPress plugin, I might create it, who knows. I like those little plugins, tiny little pieces of functionality. No scope creep. They just do one thing really well. 

As you can see, two of them have a Premium version. For what can only be called a symbolic amount, you get a bit more functionality. I'll never make back the hours I spent on these plugins, but that doesn't matter. I didn't make them paid to get back those hours. It was more of a gut feeling, a sense of rightness about it all. You see, I built these plugins in a different era. I built CPCM in 2009. I loved working on that plugin. It was a hobby project, it was fun to build, it was tinkering on a Saturday afternoon. And most of all: The support forum flooded with happy people, who were grateful for the plugin and asked for more features. They didn't demand more features. They just asked, with a feeling of "This is great, it would be even better if...". And I loved that.

Then came along our own business, and the same dynamic continued. People were happy with the product and asked for more. And I gave more. And predictably, I gave so much that it wasn't sustainable. I said yes to everything, because I did want to build all of it. But I couldn't. There just wasn't enough time in a day to build all of it. Obviously, that disappoints people in ways that would have been preventable if I had just said "no". Ooh, look, another human being learning the same life lesson that others before her already preached. Yes, now it was my turn to learn that lesson. Some of our customers were easily stressed and became demanding. Don't get me wrong, a lot of them are great, understanding, warm people. And yet, that dynamic couldn't continue.

Honestly, I've been on the customer end of it, too. I was frustrated with an open source product, kept running into errors and basically demanded help. Not pretty. I've been on both ends of the dynamic.

On the other hand, a few weeks back I asked for support from my webhoster. I migrated my website back to them and the system got hung up while disconnecting the temporary domain name I had registered. I had now moved telodelic.nl to them and wanted to attach it to the hosting plan instead of the temporary domain. I pressed a button in their oneHome portal, which said "disconnect domain" and... the system got hung up. Everything was unreachable, both the test domain and telodelic.nl. They resolved the error by reattaching the temporary domain name to the hosting plan and referred me to a manual on how to switch out the test domain for telodelic.nl. (Turns out the button I pressed in oneHome shouldn't have been there, I should have gone directly to DirectAdmin.) And then at the bottom of the e-mail it said "We can also switch the domains for you, for €24,-." And that felt very right. They helped me resolve the initial error, reset me to the point where I could continue myself and signaled that if I wanted help beyond that, I'd have to pay. No problem. I followed the manual and everything went just fine.

Changing my WordPress plugins from Free to Premium, and removing some functionality from the Free version (and eventually pulling the old versions off the market place) reflect a change inside of me. A more sustainable way of working.