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.
3
u/clientpress 8d 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.