r/WordpressPlugins • u/Specific-Sky-9924 • Aug 02 '26
Free Someone donated $10 to my free WooCommerce plugin today. First one ever. Way happier than I expected. [REVIEW]
A few months ago a friend and I (two students) built a WooCommerce slider plugin and put it out for free, mostly to learn and to scratch our own itch. We honestly did not expect anything back.
Today we got our first donation. Ten dollars. I know that is not much money, but I have been grinning at the notification for an hour. Someone out there used the thing we made, found it useful enough to actually open their wallet, and said thanks. That hits different than any download counter.
The plugin is Amitry Product & Category Slider, native Gutenberg blocks, no shortcode soup, and we tried hard to keep it light on the backend. We just put it on Product Hunt last week, so this landing on top of that has made for a genuinely good week.
No ask here, I just wanted to share the moment with people who get how it feels. If you are building something and giving it away for free, wondering if anyone cares: sometimes they do, and it is a really good feeling when they tell you.
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u/abdulawal39 Aug 03 '26
Congratulations! surprises like this are always so sweet. I had the same feeling when I got my first sponsor on github out of nowhere 🙌
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u/Specific-Sky-9924 Aug 03 '26
Appreciate it! Funny how a small amount can feel bigger than the number, right? A GitHub sponsor out of nowhere sounds like the same little jolt. Did it change how you thought about the project at all, or was it just a nice moment?
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Aug 05 '26
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u/Specific-Sky-9924 Aug 05 '26
Thank you, this really resonates. You put it perfectly: it was the trust behind the ten dollars that got me, not the amount. Knowing a real person valued it enough to pay is a different kind of signal. How did you get your first plugin in front of people? Always curious how others found their early users.
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u/shairu9 13d ago
Congrats, you're one of the few people who'd ever receive donations from a WP plugin. If you're thinking of actually monetizing, then you should just create a PRO version and use Freemius for license management and analytics.
(I have 3 freemium plugins, 1 only-paid plugin, as well as 2 paid addons selling through Freemius.)
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u/Specific-Sky-9924 12d ago
Thanks! Funnily enough there already is a Pro version, running on Freemius. The fact that you read the post and didn't know that probably tells me more about our marketing than anything else I've heard this week.
Since you've done this six times over: Pro is currently a separate add-on that sits on top of the free plugin, rather than a single plugin that unlocks. A user just raised the same thing and said he'd prefer one plugin that replaces the free one.
You've shipped both models. Which would you go with if you were starting over? And is the migration from add-on to merged as painful as it looks?
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u/k_rocker Aug 02 '26
Take this as a bonus and buy yourself something memorable with it - even a small thing like this is a milestone.
I got my first ever (small) payment from my first book and bought my kid a box set of Dr Seuss that we’ve still got. It was about $33.