[nikolay]

The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!

[9dev]

Can’t blame the plugin authors, a freemium Wordpress plugin is about the best possible source of passive income there is. Have a security issue? Take your time, they are coming anyway!

[nikolay]

I blame them as they usually don't know how to price their plugins to get real revenue.

[bboygravity]

From a business perspective the significant part of the website costs are man-hours for setup and maintenance.

Got something to say about how WP compares to others when it comes to man-hours (assuming you can buy any and all plugins you want)? Honest question, because I have no idea about CMS.

[nikolay]

But they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins, so I use a third-party service that leverages GPL to offer most premium themes and plugins for a low annual fee.

[rafark]

So basically you just want the functionality without paying for it.

> they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins

People who complain about the prices also forget that a lot of these plugins take months or years to develop. You’re (we’ll not you since you made it clear you don’t pay the devs) literally getting thousands of man hours for like 60 bucks per year.

[nikolay]

I never said that - they need to price adequately. 99% of the plugins are just overpriced junk that's not worth even 1% of what they ask for it.

[rafark]

You said you’re buying from an unauthorized reseller because you don’t want to pay what they ask for. If you don’t agree with their prices that’s totally fine. But then why use their products? You want to use them but you don’t want to pay the developers.

[nikolay]

Unauthorized?! It's 100% legal! Maybe not 100% moral, but I needed this for a nonprofit. I donated GiveWP to this and 2 more nonprofits - it costs me $420 per year and it's worth it. But no plugin developer offers a nonprofit discount, and the pricing is just cost-prohibitive. So, I donated the lifetime plan for GPL Vault. Keep in mind, that I could've decided not to pay for GiveWP as it's available from GPL Vault, but because I know it's a complex piece of work... although extremely buggy, I wanted the developers to continue the development and fix those bugs at some point far in the future, but the other stuff is just nice-to-haves and not worth the asking price.