Transparency Report of January 2023

Overview

This is the 44th monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin, documenting my journey to be fairly compensated for my time and reach 10,000 active installs.

💰 $8,738.49/$38,019.28 (fairly compensated for time)

🖥5,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)

What Happened This Month

Downloads

A couple releases to WordPress.org in January, although quite a few more to

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

A bit over a 100 new subscribers in January, which is larger than last month.

Website Visits

Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)

Traffic up a little bit in January. An extra article published at the very end of December may account for this difference,

Freemius Stats

Freemius just upgraded their analytics data, and there’s a ton of it. So much that it’s actually tedious taking screenshots of it (I tried using Nimbus note to take a screenshot of the entire page, but somehow that doesn’t work on this particular page.)

Sales

I appreciate Freemius’ break-down of the transactions. You can see that New Subscriptions was down significantly from last month, whereas Subscription Renewals was up majorly: this last month was mostly riding on previous successes…

Lots of refunds this month really ate into the new revenue. Someone bought an annual license then quickly realized using a plugin and getting it to work with all their other plugins was not a task they were up to, so I gave them a refund.
Another person actually asked for 2 months to be refunded for similar reasons, but I actually just refunded them one month, not two. I demonstrated to them that the software was actually working as intended (in their defense, there was a problem integrating with one of their plugins, but in my defense I got that resolved). Oh well.

Also very helpful: recurring professional licenses were what made most of the money this month, and the recurring revenue dwindled a bit this month.

Active subscriptions actually fell a bit this month, which is obviously nothing to celebrate (despite net revenue being relatively high.)

Most of this month’s revenue was from a few annual licenses renewing. So, unless I have more annual licenses renewing in February, and everything else continues as-is, next month won’t be so good.

Audience

Slightly fewer negative installs this month. I’ve brought this issue to Freemius’ support’s attention (and had another Freemius seller report the same problem) but it persists.
Not as much growth this month as last but again not negative so I can’t complain.

Interestingly there was a surge around the 20th of the month of everything: new activations but also deactivations. That hints to me that most of the folks activating it were also deactivating it almost immediately (either because they printed their blog and were done with it, or they didn’t like it… hard to know which.)

Strangely a lot of folks holding strong on 3.3 and 3.18. It seems only about a 10th of my users immediately update when a new release comes out.

WordPress 6.1’s adoption steadily growing.

I admit it’s actually a bit hard to tell from this graph, but th estate on the right help: the big winner is PHP 8.0 followed closely by PHP 8.1, not 7.4.

2.5.3 is up somehow. Meuh.

Americans and Italians seem to be growing the most, although the change is fairly slight.

Chinese is again on the list, another reminder to translate the plugin for those users…

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

Improved Elementor Integration

A lot of my time in January was still occupied with getting PMB to play nicely with Elementor pagebuilder for a Business customer. It’s occupied quite a lot of time, and it’s been pretty high priority (I wanted to make sure the customer had a presentable document before their monthly subscription was renewed).

Specific improvements in January to Elementor integration include:

Make galleries added with Elementor appear as as gallery instead of series of images in eBooks
Centre Elementor images by default
More consistently convert Elementor videos to screenshots and URLs (previously, some would get missed; more on this later)
Show Elementor items that are animated (before they wouldn’t appear in PMB)

Lazy-Loading Improvements

One of the biggest problems I’ve been experiencing with Elementor is that it lazy-loads videos and so they wouldn’t always get converted into screenshots and URLs.

In December 2022 I added a band-aid fix which guessed at how long to wait until the videos were rendered, but the guess wasn’t always right.

Generally, it was becoming more unmanageable to try to figure out when all the other plugins’ were done executing their Javascript so PMB could run its Javascript. But in January 2023 I’m hopeful this problem was solved.

In version 3.21.0, instead of running PMB’s Print Page’s Javascript after a guessed-upon number of seconds, PMB now does it only when the download button is clicked. This gives other plugins’ plenty of time to execute their Javascript, and even gives the user a chance to scroll down the page in case other plugins are expecting that.

(Having written about this, though, I’m realizing this may be an issue for folks printing directly from their browser. I’ll need to handle that in an upcoming update.)

Thinking Out Loud

Pricing Changes Forthcoming

I’m becoming aware that the bulk prices I’m offering are not very attractive. Despite having quite a few inquiries into the price of PMB for multiple sites, I’ve only ever had sales for individual sites.

Originally, my bulk pricing mimicked Prince CSS’s bulk pricing, which just gives a 30% discount when you buy 5 licenses. I saw that wasn’t working about a year ago and basically doubled the discount to 70% on the 30-site license. But I’m seeing even that’s not enough.

I talked with Freemius’ CEO, Vova Feldman, who had some very helpful feedback on pricing. He agrees the bulk prices need to come down further, but also that the Hobbyist plan and Professional plan should be closer in price (to give folks a proper incentive to buy the Professional plan).

I’d also like to sell more annual licenses, because:

I think it’s better for users to get an annual license and not feel rushed to create their documents
it’s not much more support work for me
obviously, it’s more income for me too. But I realize it needs to be priced right so it’s in customers’ best interests also.

So, most likely the price of annual licenses will be coming down a bit too.

Next, I have mixed feelings on selling the Business licenses: they’re too cheap and yet too expensive also. They probably take 10x more support time, and if you were to contract a developer by the hour, you’d probably spend 10x as much on the work too (unless you hire someone inexperienced, in which case it would be about the same.) But the Business licenses are also about double the price of the Professional license. Also: I find working closely with a Business user probably guides my development better than working in a vacuum. So lots of mixed-up thoughts regarding pricing Business licenses…

Lastly: shouldn’t I not be talking about prices openly? Maybe. But I want the prices to be fair, so getting feedback is helpful. And very few potential customers read these transparency reports anyway 😋.

Likely FAQs regarding pricing changes

What happens to existing license holders when I change the prices? I think folks who bought within the last month should be able to get a refund of the difference. I don’t want anyone to refrain from buying now because prices might go down next month.

Why not extend it further back? A month is my hard cut-off for offering refunds (technically I don’t give refunds because that’s what Freemius’ in-plugin pricing page says, but I make exceptions) and so that time limit seems to apply here too.

Won’t existing payers feel bad if prices go down? I suppose so, which is one reason I’m hesitant to do it, even if I have data suggesting lower prices will put the software within more folks’ reach. But that’s the nature of any purchase, no? Price might go up or down in the future. Also, this might be comforting: each additional customer required more support earlier on, so they should have paid more, from my cost perspective. But from their perspective? I guess they lost out. As compensation, I’m willing to give them a discount on their next payment equaling the difference between what they paid back then and the current price (so if someone paid $200 a year ago, and the price changes to $180 tomorrow, when they renew they can ask for a one-time additional $20 discount, so they’ll only pay $160.) I think that’s more fair right?

No Blog Post on Publishing to Amazon Yet

Last month I made a YouTube video showing how to publish a book from WordPress to Amazon Kindle, and I’ve intended to make an accompanying blog post all month. Well, I still haven’t. Maybe I’ll do it this month, or get a chatbot to do it for me (just kidding, I remain skeptical of AI, although I’m coming around.)

What’s Next?

I’m going to get that post on publishing to Amazon done, adjust prices, and get started on adding Pro print buttons.

Thoughts and feedback are welcome!