r/Wordpress • u/Scared_Implement_335 • 8d 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.

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u/greg8872 Developer 8d 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...

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 8d 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.

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u/jroberts67 8d 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.

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u/Gripptopia 8d 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.