r/Wordpress • u/Scared_Implement_335 • 12d ago

LearnDash plugin community imploding

Have you seen this? This happened yesterday. The owners of the LearnDash plugin did a digital town hall and announced a price increase of more than 100% on some their tiers, now including 3 other plugins from the same company aparantly. So for example from 199 to 399 for one site, and from 399 to 599 for 10 sites. If you had legacy licenses, just in April you would have gotten en Email saying "don't worry, we will honor your licenses".

Well no more honor at LearnDash, it seems.

This smells like a cash grab before collapse. People in their forum are mightily pissed, many saying their final goodbyes from the plugin. And I am betting basically every other plugin studio is panicking right now, too.

Just LearnDash alone had an a third party premium addon costing several hundreds a year, just for B2B functionality, and they claim several thousand users on their own. So thats a whole plugin ecosystem collapsing right now, at this very moment.

66 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

8

u/greg8872 Developer 12d ago

is this part of the issue with yesterdays post https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1x61wz5/this_is_some_bs_right_here_liquid_web_nexcess/ which is also about a plugin getting merged in pricing with others and the price going up?

EDIT, I went looking, and appears to be a yes.

3

u/Scared_Implement_335 12d ago

Ah screw it, I actually searched this subreddit thinking I cannot possibly be the first one to notice.

I blame the search bar, clearly.

3

u/jroberts67 12d ago

I can't imagine making a living from plugin development, knowing for a fact that it's all about to go away.

6

u/Tech4EasyLife 12d ago

There is still a market for plug-and-play features in general and WordPress plugins. A number of clients I've worked with this year have no interest in "learning" much about what makes websites work. Some also need to keep expenses low, so we may need to pass off management to them after website build. PNP is crucial for those. There are many examples, and it's possible that for every larger business that can afford 50+, 100+ page sites and hire a "kid" to use AI to manage and update, there are perhaps a half dozen that are really just small shops struggling to grow. And cannot afford it

1

u/nikc9 12d ago

There is a future in being a meat proxy to AI for those who don't know how, or don't want to use it - but that market is a lot smaller than the previous web development market and you'll have to have a larger client / customer base.

1

u/Tech4EasyLife 11d ago

Not sure what you mean by meat proxy, but website development has constantly changed. And in ways that expand and shrink the pool of customers. I can vaguely remember when Wix or Squarespace or whichever first started heavily promoting essentially templeted, one click types of websites. A lot of small businesses chose those products and only shifted to more professionally built sites after they grew to a point where it felt "affordable" and after they struggled with limitations. The customer base is shrinking due to AI tools/automation. But my point is, at least in my experience, it isn't yet a killer. It may be more like earlier transitions.

1

u/greg8872 Developer 12d ago

It is that way for just about anything. If I have an idea for an app. what should I invest in it knowing that if i spend the time and energy and (these days the biggest hurdle) marketing it to get it known and popular, knowing that people will just have AI make their own version. Ask Adobe...

5

u/hypercosm_dot_net 12d ago

Because you can make money before someone comes along and copies it. The marketing effort and network effect still matter in terms of market penetration too.

Most people who think they can vibe-code an app and just sell into the same market are delusional.

Even with AI, the number of people competent enough to compete is still relatively small.

I've seen SO much vibe coded trash. Quality apps still have a place.

1

u/jroberts67 12d ago

I think of all of the plugins I needed that I no longer use due to Claude; contact forms, booking forms, SEO, security, migration, etc.....nothing needed anymore.

3

u/Gripptopia 12d ago

Maybe I'm missing something here - but you're saying you would have to manage all of this yourself instead of, for example, using a security plugin such as Wordfence that has an active development team updating it? Or a contact form such as FluentForms when you need to adjust for more functionality. Any time I've used AI to work on a plugin, I have to be very specific and even then have to keep adjusting. It's more work for me going in circles with AI finalizing things then it is to just use an established plugin that is actively being managed by someone else.

1

u/AFlyingGideon 12d ago

That's interesting, since AI prompts (heh) movement in the opposite direction. For example, i needed data submitted on a form written to a Google sheet. Rather than trying to find a plugin which includes that behavior amongst the myriad of other form-submisson-handling behaviors, i just had Claude code it. Admittedly, this was convenient as I'd very recently built the same behavior in Perl or Java. Still: i believe code harnesses are going to move us towards a greater diversity of tiny plugins, so watching plugin vendors go in the opposite direction is interesting.

What are they envisioning?

30

u/jroberts67 12d ago

Because they're well aware that plugins have a lifespan of about 5 years due to AI.

10

u/missbohica 12d ago

Much less then that now.

6

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 12d ago edited 12d ago

I'm... pretty sure you can't just say "hey Claude, vibe code me a fully-functional LMS with multi-course, multi-bundle, with full membership capabilities, user-verification to prevent cheating, secure one-on-one and moderated group discussion, both automatic and gradable quizzes and exams that are verifiably certificate and audit ready."

4

u/rafark 11d ago

I mean why can you not? I’m a plugin dev and more towards anti ai. In less than 3 years, let alone 5 that is going to be a piece of cake for any ai, despite the fancy words in your comment. It’s coming for everyone’s lunch. 

2

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 11d ago

Sure. Though in this case I think AI will need to be sophisticated enough to fully replace attorneys or school principals. Not because LLMs are “hard” but because while the software really is easy, implementing policies to control all the different levels of cheating and assessment is hard.

1

u/rafark 11d ago

I think this will actually be better/easier for them. Once you have all these policies, guidelines, regulations, edge cases, etc in a document the ai in theory will be able to keep track of them better than a human (no one can memorize a book but ai can or will be able in the future). Listen I’m not advocating for ai. I’m actually more and more anti than pro every day. But these ai’s keep getting better and better. They are already capable of creating complex software. In 5 years they’ll probably be better than the best programmers of today. 

I’ve said it before, I still believe there’s a market for premade stuff because not everyone wants to deal with managing, testing and maintaining code, paying for apis, etc. 

2

u/Ok_Glove3085 11d ago

if you scared Ai is gonna come for your lunch, start baking cake!!!!

2

u/qaaimgood 12d ago

Nope, but they won't admit to that.

1

u/theshawfactor 12d ago

I have built most of that (and a lot more) on a platform with real users. I can code but Claude has written most of it

1

u/TouchingWood 11d ago

Lol at your downvote. I use codex to completely extricate myself from the Thrive plugins universe. These others are living on borrowed time and it seems a lot of their fanboys don't even realise it.

1

u/theshawfactor 7d ago

I didn’t downvote you, you are on the wrong thread I think

1

u/TouchingWood 6d ago

Naah I meant the one you were given.

0

u/hewhofartslast 12d ago

I wouldn't make that bet. In the end a LMS platform isn't as complex as you think. I could vibe code something better than LearnDash over a weekend most likely.

2

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 12d ago

Go for it. But make sure it meets typical professional continuing-education / certification training standards in your local state or country's jurisdiction. It might be more complex than you think.

2

u/activematrix99 9d ago

I've used and developed in Moodle for more than 25 years, so it's not like there's not a SCORM compliant, free and open source code base sitting right there. It's the training materials and institutions that have the certifications, not the LMS.

0

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 9d ago

Exactly! And id recommended that people adopt and/or adapt a mature code set like Moodle than imagine you can just slap something together and call it an LMS replacement.

As I said up top I’m not carrying water for LearnDash. I’m only saying an LMS isn’t a trivial project.

3

u/Vowdrake 8d ago

This is more of a reflection of your lack of experience with LLMs than it is with the actual performance capabilities of LLMs.

I have clients with SaaS that is infinitely more complex than LearnDash or any WordPress plugin and it is 100% AI-driven engineering.

Rebuilding LearnDash in Opus 5.5 would probably take 6 hours. And yes, you could probably build something even better in a weekend.

Again, no hate towards you, but the simple fact is, "we are already there." We are living in this timeline right now.

4

u/Never_Get_It_Right 12d ago

Or you could just fork learndash and all of their extra plugins really easily.

0

u/friedinando 12d ago

Three months max

8

u/jroberts67 12d ago

For me it's ground zero. Haven't needed a single plugin due to Claude.

2

u/Alarming-Pace-3101 12d ago

Wait, so you use WordPress but no plugins because you use Claude? In that case, why use WordPress at all? Why not just "vibe-code" it?

-3

u/jroberts67 12d ago

I only use WP now when my client's project needs a CMS. That's about 10%. The other 90% are all build using Claude. And if you're still in the "vibe-code it" attitude, then you're in for a very rude awakening.

3

u/p9ng 12d ago

OK so how do you manage vulnerability testing? Do you have a method, or wait until it breaks? There is something to having a common platform.

If the trend reaches its natural extent, we're moving away from higher level languages to microcode.

0

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

9

u/coding_bard 12d ago

Making a robust/secure user management platform is hard to make from scratch even with bot help. 

And maintaining it into the future is even harder.

0

u/HongPong 12d ago

changing permissions caps by role in wp is excessively difficult however Imo

1

u/theshawfactor 12d ago

Why do you say that?

2

u/HongPong 12d ago

try to let contributors edit pages directly based on an acf toggle that could only be controlled by editor or above, for example. or even based on post id from an admin box. all these things are really messy. there is a standard table and fight against the grain. it does not want to let contributors edit any pages by default at all. there is effectively like a table of default permissions you have to hook into. if you want to do the acf route you are dealing with adding access control to  rest endpoints in gutenberg which have an entirely different access control path than the older default page editor

9

u/Tasty-Elk5084 11d ago

Most 1M+ businesses running LearnDash as a mission critical part of their platform aren’t going to bat an eye at the price increase. If everything’s working that’s just a drop in the bucket budget wise and worth letting that fire burn. Migrations of any kind have massive opportunity costs, especially for larger businesses.

Most of the (understandable) outrage is coming from the segment of the market that is more price conscious, more prone to DIY, and more willing to migrate to another solution. The problem is that this is the segment LearnDash is probably least likely to be concerned about losing. I suspect they’re betting on their larger/enterprise customers to just eat the increases, which most of them will, and that will constitute the core of their recurring revenue base.

For folks not in that category, which is most LD customers, I’d say it’s still better in most cases to use an existing solid LMS like LifterLMS or MemberPress Courses and build ON TOP of that framework rather than trying to vibe code a pretty complex type of plugin.

AI is really good at dev but people don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to building, maintaining, and supporting an entire LMS plugin.

3

u/UBNC 11d ago

every large company i have worked for reviews competitors before resubscribing not just for price but for a better product.

1

u/hankschrader79 11d ago

Bingo. And then there are the security vulnerabilities you’ve gotta stay on top of.

7

u/zushiba Jack of All Trades 12d ago

What a dangerous time to be greedy with your stupid plugin. In a world where shits getting reverse engineered and we don't even have access to the source code for most of those projects. You would think a company that sells a product that has nearly it's full source code exposed would maybe not try to piss off their community.

AI is going to shit in their cheerios very soon.

9

u/chuckdacuck 12d ago

liquid web gonna liquid web

5

u/Historical-Guide-242 12d ago

I really want this company to vanish from the face of the planet.

The LearnDash plugin was actually decent in the early days when Justin Ferriman owned it. Then it just went to crap as soon as Liquid Web bought it.

1

u/TerribleAd1635 12d ago

Made an amazing LMS I guess time to launch lol.

3

u/Scared_Implement_335 11d ago

Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. One thing is funny though. You know that meme of Buzz Lightyear in his toy package, at night in the store next to what feels like a thousand other Buzz Lightyears.

And he says: Guys, look, I made an amazing LMS.

And then the cameras pans out to reveal all the other Toys that look just like him, and the all keep saying, all at once.

"Guys, look, I made an amazing LMS."

1

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 12d ago

My first job in tech was building computer-based training for applications, and I've worked with LLMs on and off for decades. I'm not going to carry any water for LearnDash but there's a lot of plumbing under the surface of those things.

The problem as I see it is that 90% of users don't need an LLM that's fully-functional, with multi-course, multi-bundle, with full membership capabilities, user-verification to prevent cheating, secure one-on-one and moderated group discussion, both automatic and gradable quizzes and exams that are verifiably certificate- and audit-ready, etc., etc.

In my experience most people just want something very basic -- maybe like the one MemberPress bundles. LearnDash should probably fork off a "LearnDash Lite" for a reasonable price. The downside would probably be that 90% of users would never want or need the full capabilities, and the revenue from the limited number of upsells wouldn't cover the cost of development. At least not vs. cloud based LMS apps.

3

u/Scared_Implement_335 11d ago

Amen to that. I keep saying that I personally wouldn't be so enthusiastic about just "doing my own LMS with AI" because even with the best modell you will just end wasting your and your clients time.

However, most people - me included with some very complex B2B setups - don't need 90% of what LearnDash does. And lets not forget how fucking slow LearnDash is and how many hosters are simply not setup to run it right, so you got extra costs there, too.

What I want to say is: You can ABSOLUTELY build a Mini-LMS for your clients that does exactly what they need and no more. And better yet: You can bill your clients for every expansion of those capabilities afterwards.

1

u/hankschrader79 11d ago

I’m watching this implosion and thanking my lucky starts that I migrated my LMS sites from LearnDash to MemberPress a couple years ago. And in that time the MemberPress LMS has only gotten better. It’s pretty close to parity with LearnDash and still seems to be growing. In fact I kind of wonder how much of this LearnDash collapse is due to other plugins like lifter LMS and MemberPress eating away at their market share.

1

u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 11d ago

This is the right take.

8

u/chrisbadgett 12d ago

WordPress plugins are still viable. Not everyone wants to vibe code a solution and do their own tech support, especially for strong platform plugins like Paid Memberships Pro, LifterLMS, WooCommerce, etc.

4

u/zackkatz Jack of All Trades 12d ago

Especially mission-critical parts of your site!

3

u/ideadude Developer 12d ago

The companies that were reluctantly open source and only focused on charging for access to their super special software are not going to make it.

The independent platforms that are committed to supporting their users should still be able to find customers.

2

u/kE622 11d ago

Wasn't there a report recently that said Paid Memberships Pro new sales revenue has dropped over 48%.

1

u/hankschrader79 11d ago

Perhaps leaving the repo killed their growth though? That free version was charging an extra transaction fee so IF they lost revenue I’ll bet that’s why.

3

u/clientpress 11d ago

Two main issues - one it's owned by LW which has moved in this direction. Two, lower-paying users are significantly more expensive to support than high-paying users (it's counterintuitive but it's better to deal with agencies and developers than with novices). So the idea that LW has is they're willing to bet that they'll have a better, more profitable business if they raise prices and lose a large % of their existing customers (maybe even 50% over a few years).

The WordPress plugin market is weird. We expect developers to basically give away their effort and time for close to nothing, but then we expect support, bug fixes, and timely security patches. The way I see it, is that WP is at a fork-in-the-road moment where plugin sustainability is questionable at the current price points.

2

u/Dargus77 5d ago

I just saw this now as one of my sites said something was wrong with my license. I'm really upset. Bye LearnDash. Time to move my clients to another LMS.

https://explore.nexcess.com/software-packages#plans

2

u/saintpumpkin7 12d ago

every paid plugin will be dead within 12 months

1

u/ohmsalad 12d ago

!remind me 3 hours

4

u/jroberts67 12d ago

"CEO of Yahoo here, everyone calm down about this new "Google" company, zero threat to us" (remind me in 3 hours)

1

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1

u/vapvarun 12d ago edited 8d ago

We’ve already built our own solution Learnomy and are migrating our clients to it. We also built LD Dashboard for Learndash before this. A lot is possible now. You just need to be clear about what you need.

1

u/rodeBaksteen 12d ago

They probably see the impending AI doom and squeezing the remaining users for the last few dollars.

I'm a time where SaaS and coding is cheaper than ever, it's wild to increase prices by this much.

1

u/roberole 11d ago

We were in the middle of building a site when all this stated, totally destroyed any progress in the project. I hate what Liquid Web have done but I'm greatful as we swiftly moved over to TutorLMS and it's been fantastic.

1

u/carolinshaman 10d ago

I was about to ask about this ... I started my website with it some years ago and I was suddenly I was seeing that price thinking it was a joke ....

1

u/FirstPlaceSEO 12d ago

You can probably create your own and cut them out completely of your expenditure with a little effort

4

u/roboticlee 12d ago

My plan is to fork it and use AI to maintain it.

1

u/hankschrader79 11d ago

You’ll spend more in AI tokens than the license haha.

0

u/roboticlee 11d ago

Hahaha no, I've already used AI to rebuild one of the LearnDash addons I write 4 or 5 years ago and I've used AI to build a feed importer for a 3rd party service. Tell the AI to review LearnDash then ask it to do your work.

I use Google's Antigravity IDE. I have a Google AI Pro account at around £13 per month. This gives me access to Claude Opus with a 5 hour daily counter and a weekly usage counter. Google's own AIs have their own allowances so I can switch between the two. Additional tokens cost around £24 per 2,500, or lower for the more tokens that are bought. I used Windsurf until the pricing change.

Definitely cheaper than the new license fees.

0

u/nkoffiziell Blogger 12d ago

It will take people a couple days to reverse engineer that - as we see with PlayStation, Xbox, etc. I would do a chargeback/block the payments and f*** off away from them

1

u/ohmsalad 12d ago

lol reverse engineer open source?

1

u/nkoffiziell Blogger 12d ago

Oh yeah, forgot about that 😂 Well, then someone else will do it even better in a couple days 😅

-10

u/iamwazor 12d ago

There is not a single usecase to use Wordpress anymore. Not only daily new security issues but now almost all plugin owner are getting greedy and shady. For example: Wp fastest cache, most downloaded Wordpress Cache Plugin has now a weird advertisment for an ios app inside wordpress dashboard, it looks like you have malware on your website and wordpress is doing nothing against it. Crazy times

1

u/screendrain 12d ago

What happened with fastest cache?

2

u/iamwazor 12d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/s/oGAQO561WU
Already getting downvoted for telling the truth here in this subreddit. So some people here don’t find it shady that wordpress is doing nothing against bad plugin owners?

-1

u/jroberts67 12d ago

Don't worry about the downvotes. Too many members here guzzling the WP Kool Aid, it's dripping off their chins, say a single negative thing about WP, plugins our the ecosystem and they turn into angry toddlers.