Pricing premium WordPress plugins is always a challenge. Ideally, you can charge the maximum value your customer gets from it. However, without an attached SaaS service, we cannot track that, so we develop various tiers based on the number of sites or service levels to increase prices for those getting the most out of our product.

This model has many flaws, for which we envy SaaS services, but there is one I have never heard business owners talk about. What about potential clients who cannot put a price on the value you provide or have no budget because their project is entirely non-profit?

Being on both sides, this question has followed me since I started selling premium plugin licenses for Advanced Ads more than ten years ago. It’s time to express my thoughts on what a dedicated non-commercial license might look like.

Business vs. non-commercial

Consumers and small NGOs often exchange time for money, sometimes at a terrible rate. I know because I am on that site myself, doing a few personal projects and managing the websites of a couple of NGOs.

It is above me to say why people with a bit of money don’t spend it on personal projects, even though it would save them some time for other things.

It is also not true that NGOs lack money, at least for relatively small amounts, like a single license for a few premium plugins.

Maybe their structure, with most financial decisions having to go through some board of non-website owners, makes even the discussion about premium services an ordeal.

I have indeed once purchased a license for Advanced Custom Fields for an NGO out of my pocket to get on with the project and not have to wait for a decision. However, that was when ACF still had lifetime licenses.

Also, while a plugin license might cost some money, small NGOs usually don’t have the budget to pay a professional developer to manage their site. In my experience, the latter are very often the ones with the expertise to even know about specific plugins and premium offers in the first place.

Of course, if an NGO or person pays a web developer or has a budget for it, they don’t fall under the discussion of this article.

Licenses for non-commercial sites

As someone selling premium WordPress plugins and managing personal and NGO websites, I have thought for over a decade about a pricing tier for non-commercial websites.

There are plugins with fewer non-commercial users, like a shopping plugin or Advanced Ads for making money from display ads. These plugins might not need to consider non-commercial customers because they won’t have them.

On the other hand, contact form plugins or solutions like my Image Source Control plugin to manage author attributions and clean up unused images, are also quite common, or maybe especially, among non-commercial projects.

Pricing for non-commercial websites

Currently, I am doing what many of my plugin-selling peers do: Give discounts to NGOs. How do they learn about it, though?

With Image Source Control, I have chosen to display a “Personal” tier that caters to non-commercial projects. The differences to the higher tiers are:

• The website belongs to the buyer, so it is not meant for agencies purchasing it for customers.
• Email support is only available to the original buyer’s email address.
• No support for multisites.

Right now, none of these criteria are enforced or checked automatically. Some customers use that loophole and purchase the lower tier for a commercial project. I let it slip if they don’t need support.

Advanced pricing attributes

Once I sat down and took notes on enforceable conditions for non-commercial sites, a few more ideas came up. Image Source Control isn’t big enough to justify developing most of them for itself, but if the time comes, I will come back to this.

In the meantime, it is also a great list to discuss with fellow plugin developers.

Remove tax and company input

I don’t know about small NGOs in most countries, but consumers usually pay sales tax, i.e., VAT. So, when selecting a non-commercial pricing tier, one could remove fields for VAT IDs and company names from the checkout.

This would then tell companies that they chose the wrong product.

Commercial customers will still try to sneak in this data via another field. So, I might add a note on the invoice saying, “This license is for non-commercial entities only, and the amount does not reduce business tax.“

While this might not prevent businesses from purchasing, it is a clear signal and might at least let them answer questions from their accountant.

An advanced version of this could be an automated check for the name on the invoice appearing in the website, before the product could be downloaded. This would demand an input field in the checkout for a link to an imprint or contact page. Outside of the EU, not all sites have it, though.

Limited support

I’d give some NGOs a free license if it weren’t for support. Since most NGO websites are not managed by a professional, they might need more or less support to set them up.

One key aspect of making licenses available for a lower price would be limiting support. Maybe give it only for the first month or none at all. The latter wasn’t really an option for me since it might prevent serious bugs from being reported.

Before I make an offer to a non-commercial entity, I often look at their website, trying to estimate how complicated it would be to set everything up based on common issues I know of. By now, I have a small tool that does that for me automatically.

Long-term licenses

One of my favorite offers to non-commercial sites is a long-term license. They pay the same amount as for a usual annual license, but it is extended by one or two more years. Support is still capped at one year for the reasons above.

This seems like a good solution for two reasons:

• They don’t need to worry about extending their license often, which might always require an internal discussion about the funds.
• I get the initial setup costs covered.

No multisites

Non-commercials rarely set up multisites since they would need someone with advanced knowledge. It also means they have a larger project.

I list it here again because I think the license activation workflow could also check it automatically. It shouldn’t be hard to implement.

No moving of licenses

It is common for agencies and developers to set up a staging site for client projects. When the site goes live, they need to move the license activation from that staging to the live site.

For non-commercial projects, one could prevent the switching of activations and only allow activation on a single site once.

Conclusions

I am glad to have written this down after more than ten years of asking myself how I price a product for non-commercial users.

Maybe I should not ask myself this question at all. Non-commercial sites may also not need commercial tools because they compensate for their time.

Still, I always miss someone cheering for them in business discussions and the “worth” of one’s product.

Have you got an opinion? Let me know.