anniversary.md

About

Today is 1 year anniversary of changing distribution of the plugin from free/premium versions and free support to free plugin and paid support.
We will go over everything that changed and make a conclusion whether this was a good move or not. If you are a developer looking to switch to this model or know someone who does, read this / send this to them to make a better decision.

Sales

Getting compensation for time involved is important even if one enjoys doing it in order to be able to keep up with the demand. Immediately after switching to new system, sales dropped by 80%. Once people got used to it, it "only" ended up being a 60% income loss.

Community feedback

Minecraft community accepted paid plugin concept, however it refuses to accept paid support. On a daily basis I got into arguments with people who say support should be free, saying it's stupid to ask for money to answer a simple question (which usually is answered on the wiki which they didn't bother reading). Answering that one with a wiki link only resulted in more people pinging me for help, since I "helped" that person, so why not them as well. It's hard to draw a line between what is considered support and what isn't.

People also often say when the plugin is free the support should be too and if I want to make money, I should have made the plugin paid, because they won't pay for support, sometimes saying how many paid plugins they bought. So instead of receiving gratitude, people are showing less respect to me than to authors of paid plugins.

New model, new ways of abusing it

With paid plugins, using leaks to avoid paying is well known already. With paid support, it may not sound that simple at first, since you cannot leak one's time. But since (ab)users will do anything, they found ways. One way is to simply send me a private message and ask there. When I start explaining support is paid, they start arguing, eventually saying we wasted more time arguing than if I just helped, which more often than not is true. Sometimes, they say they won't pay for a buggy plugin (because refusing to read the wiki is a bug in the plugin). When I decide to help them to prove it's not a bug, will they buy it? Of course not.

Here's a prime example what happens

Since we're on the topic of disguising assistance requests as bugs, check closed github issues. 90% of them are free users asking for help by disguising it as bug reports.

Plugin management experience changes

Other than everything above, another change is people I'm dealing with. Previously we got all kinds of people asking for help, including those who should not be allowed to own a server. Helping them set their whole server up takes time and is pointless, because it will shut down within a month anyway. Making support paid almost perfectly filtered all those users out. Most tickets nowadays come from serious server owners who also have some manners and when told to follow a guide, they sometimes even do.

Time demand

With free users out of the way, the time demand from users naturally decreased.
However, bugs are still bugs and someone finds one, it has to be fixed no matter how many experience it.
Closing feature requests drastically decreased amount of time spent coding, since no new features or bugs are being introduced. This is, however, not related to switching monetization model.
In the end, time spent on the plugin did decrease, but not even close to as much as income did.

Spreading the plugin

Making previously paid features free helped to spread them to everyone, including servers, who will never pay for plugins (most of them). It also effectively kills paid plugins with such features by pushing standards and making people take it for granted to be free (remember featherboard? most don't anymore). Whether this is good or not is questionable. If one is looking to spread plugin as much as possible, handing it over for free is much more effective than making it paid. However, it decreases everyone's income.

Despite being taken off spigot, according to bStats, amount of servers using TAB is stable, which means new users are bumping into it thanks to recommendations and reputation built. Less popular paid-only plugins would die.

Conclusion

Every model has advantages and disadvantages. Everything cannot be achieved at the same time. Plugin cannot both be used by most servers and be paid at the same time. When deciding what model to go for, you need to consider advantages and disadvantages of each one based on your goals. Let's quickly compare 4 common types.

Free plugin:

• Fast spread
• A lot of support requests
• No income (donations just don't work)
• No need to worry about bypasses
• Income/time spent ratio is 0
• Dealing with all kind of people

Free/paid versions:

• Decent spread and letting people know you offer a paid version
• Income for paid version
• Bypassable using leaks
• Less time needed helping users
• Income/time spent ratio is decent
• Dealing with all kind of people

Paid plugin:

• Hard to spread
• Little attention from users required
• Most income
• Bypassable using leaks
• Best income/time spent ratio
• Deal only with buyers, good for mental health

Paid support:

• Fast spread
• Low income
• Little attention from users required
• Bypassable by abusing bug reports
• Poor income/time spent ratio
• Excellent user filter, deal only with serious owners (most of the time)

So was it a good move or not? For me, who is looking to slowly quit by making the plugin & wiki "perfect" and therefore nothing more to do there instead of vanishing like some people do, it was a good decision. I am spending less time on the plugin, people I am dealing with are much better to work with and a lot of things were simplified (no need to make 2 jars and worry about people compiling premium version themselves). This obviously doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. As of writing this, we have 17 open tickets. You can check out this graph of how many tickets are closed each month.

For someone who is looking to spend a lot of time on plugins and expects high income, this is definitely not the way to go.

Amazing, thank you for making this!
The screenshots of c0mingtosku disgusts me as a user and developer. They’re basically manipulating you to give them support for free.
I may try my own model similar to the ones you listed. I currently have free plugins, free support, and paid advanced support (I only charge for things that cost me unnecessary time).

That's a really good article, thanks for sharing it with everyone.
Although I struggle with similar issues, I tend to deal with them differently on my server (I am not a developer but a server owner for a long time now and we also get those kinds of users) - just harshly tell them to get lost. When people start asking me how to set up a server or how to get function X on their server or what plugins I'm using, I just tell them to use google and educate themselves, I am not there to provide that kind of support (especially to absolute strangers that I couldn't care less about).

I've heard people call me mean and unprofessional for doing this but I won't step away from it as I am providing my server for free, making no profit but I still stick to this attitude cause I actually think I'm entitled to at least that. Even though it might cost you some reputation, you can still keep your focus on the things you want to work on - no matter what that might be.

I am however not trying to tell you what to do, if this works great for you, I say keep it that way! Just thought I'd give my impressions on the matter, too 😄

Thank you so much for sharing what you've experienced as a result of the model change, and for the excellent breakdown as well.
Most people would have learned these lessons, done little with them, and then taken them to their grave. It's a shame how much knowledge is wasted that way. Instead, you've spent valuable time curating these lessons for the sake of every reader but yourself.
Thank you.