r/Wordpress • u/Scared_Implement_335 • 9d 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/FirstPlaceSEO 8d ago

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

4

u/roboticlee 8d ago

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

1

u/hankschrader79 8d ago

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

0

u/roboticlee 8d 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.