Transparency Report of July 2023

Overview

This is the 50th 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.

💰 $ 15,384.25/40,674.28(fairly compensated for time)

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

What Happened This Month

Downloads

This screenshot looks a little weird because I actually took it towards the end of August (it’s been a busy month).

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

I couldn’t get MailChimp to show me data from July only, so here’s stats from the past year.

Website Visits

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

A little regression in pageviews in July.

Freemius Stats

Sales

Quite high revenue in July from two annual business license purchases.

Pretty high refunds from a few accidents: one person said they accidentally purchased an annual subscription, which was weird; another one was my bad (someone asked to cancel and refund a duplicate license they accidentally created, which I thought I had, but it seems I only refunded one month’s purchase, I didn’t cancel the entire license; I gave them a month free to say “sorry”.)

Significant climb in recurring revenue this month.

Quite a few new subscriptions.

Three quarter’s of this month’s revenue is from a couple new annual licenses.

Still, by far, most folks are buying single-site licenses, despite the huge discount on bulk licenses.

Audience

Freemius finally reporting that I have positive active installs. I think I’ll ping them again about the bug that caused my “active installs” to be negative for so long. Otherwise, not huge growth.

Really similar stats to last month (except somehow last month evened out to about 50 more net activations.)

I noticed version 3.3 is up about 20 installations in July. I had previously heard people were somehow downloading that version, but wasn’t sure how. Well, in writing this, I finally searched it out and found the link in an old PMB Pro announcement post (to PMB’s git branch PRO/master, which was 3.3) and removed it. I suspect folks might have thought that my current version had some free featured removed from it, but I’ve never removed anything. So may as well use the latest version, people.

WordPress 6.2, the latest verison, is obviously growing. I don’t know why 5.7 is growing too, though.

PHP 7.4 most popular, but all the 8s are shooting up still.

German is becoming big enough that I’m starting to freshen up on it using Duolingo!

Woah, Italy and India are suddenly pretty high on usage. Germany is still well out ahead for 2nd place behind the US.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

WebP Support in Pro Print PDFs

Ok this feature didn’t require much effort from me, but PMB’s Pro PDF Service now supports WebP images. PMB’s Pro PDF Service uses DocRaptor to convert the prepared HTML into a PDF. Well, DocRaptor’s new API version added support for WebP images (among other things) and I’ve opted PMB into that.

This is good news because WordPress, and the web in general, is warming up strongly to WebP images, there was even talk about automatically converting all JPG images updated to WordPress into WebP, although that seems to have gotten shot down (for now). That had me worried about how PMB would handle it.

But now that DocRaptor and, by extension, PMB support WebP images, we can safely join in the WebP party.

Security Update to Freemius SDK

First off, if you’re using PMB, please make sure you’ve updated to at least 3.25.2. I know there’s a lot of you who haven’t (see above stats about PMB version usage… I think about 60% of PMB users). Here’s why…

PMB uses Freemius for monetization and licensing (ie, I made PMB, but I let Freemius take care of taking folks’ payments and stuff). Freemius partly does that from their website, but there’s a bit of code that needs to be embedded in PMB to make Freemius work. That code is called the SDK (“software development kid”).

Just like PMB and WordPress, Freemius also releases updates to its SDK periodically, which I integrate into PMB. Well, in July they had a fairly important update: they found a security bug in the SDK itself, and needed all the plugins (PMB included) to quietly integrate the update. It was kept a little secret, because as soon as you release “there’s a security flaw in this software!” hackers could know it’s worthwhile to look around in the open source code for the flaw, and then exploit it for everyone who hasn’t yet updated.

Anyway, I integrated the Freemius SDK update on the date they requested, as part of PMB 3.25.2. So, any older versions of PMB need to update as there’s a known security in the Freemius SDK bundled with earlier versions of PMB.

Thinking Out Loud

What Took So Long For This Transparency Report?

The two business licenses purchased in July have needed quite a lot of customization. Because they’ve eaten up all my PMB time in August, I’ll save talking about them in the August report. But suffice it to say I have been putting quite a bit of time into PMB.

Also, it’s summer, and I have kids at home, and I’m enjoying that. So I admit, this report has been slow in coming.

What’s Next?

For the 3rd month in a row, I’m hoping to start working non migrating from MailChimp to Mautic.