Congrats! Even for a freelance developer in the US, this is significant money, and doesn’t require directly trading time for money.
And the most important thing is that you’ve built a solid foundation to improve upon. Most people can’t ship as much as you have, and most don’t have the foresight to write a blog post about it.
I’ve started to notice similar things on the economics of themes and plugins on Themeforest. Unless you’re a top selling theme/plugin the revenues don’t often provide enough to encourage updates. I’ve had a few themes I bought go not-updated for years, so I have to switch to more popular and robust themes that I know will be supported.
Thanks for your feedback! I totally agree with you regarding the issue with non-top selling items - most of them have never been updated, so it's like a playing in lottery.
Yep, it was a side project, I'm living in a Eastern Europe (where avg. salaries are less than $500/mo), so ~$800/mo was a good additional income for me. It probably would not worth it if you're living in US/EU.
I think http://ui8.net may be a viable option for now if we're talking about design/ui-kits/templates/etc. However, I'm not sure how big their customer base is.
Support didn't take much time. However I felt that my plugins were outdated and they were too simple and haven't added a real value to WordPress eco-system.
And the most important thing is that you’ve built a solid foundation to improve upon. Most people can’t ship as much as you have, and most don’t have the foresight to write a blog post about it.
I’ve started to notice similar things on the economics of themes and plugins on Themeforest. Unless you’re a top selling theme/plugin the revenues don’t often provide enough to encourage updates. I’ve had a few themes I bought go not-updated for years, so I have to switch to more popular and robust themes that I know will be supported.