Transparency Report of October 2023 to April 2025

Overview

This is the 53rd 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. Normally I do these once a month, but basically fell off the bandwagon for a couple years.

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

🖥7,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)

What Happened Between October 2023 and April 2025

Downloads

I think this is going to be the last time I’m including this graph. It’s really not very interesting. The old “Active Install Growth” chart from wp.org conveyed meaning, but this mostly just shows when there was an update (each spike). Let me know if you disagree and think it’s useful.

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

MailChimp just lets me show the last year, where the email list has ballooned to nearly 7,000 subscribers. It’s actually a bit of a problem…

…because MailChimp wants at least $110 USD per month in order to communicate with my email list. Which feels like a lot. More on this later…

Website Visits

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

Website visits have been pretty steady and stagnant since we last checked.

Freemius Stats

Sales

The graph on the left shows monthly sales. Sales have been pretty good despite me not really putting a ton of effort into improving the plugin or marketing it. They were almost always above $500/month, and usually above $1000/month.

Average order value has definitely been steadily climbing (meaning I’ve been selling more Pro plans and/or more annual subscriptions.)

Yeah, the professional plan has been the most popular, which is what I hoped would happen. The Business plan really only makes sense for a handful of folks (although I might make it more attractive if I have help.) Hobbyist plans are slightly lower, which is probably good.

It had been going quite steadily, until the last couple months saw a pretty big upswing followed by a downswing back down to status quo in April 2025.

Monthly is the highest seller but only accounts for about half the income, I think.

Got a handful of 5-site licenses and 20-site licenses. I’d still like to do more of these.

Audience

Growth was a bit lower over the past two years than previously.

The “Abandoned Installs” is a new feature of Freemius (sites that installed the plugin but seem to be offline). I suspect that’s unusually high, but makes sense considering lots of folks use the plugin before they shut down their site.

The “Abandoned Installs” explains what’s going on here some more: like 80% of the sites using the plugin have gone offline, so of course they never update. This would probably be more helpful if we could filter out “Abandoned Installs” and only see active installs (sites we know are currently active and using the plugin.)

I don’t think I’ll include this going forward. It doesn’t communicate much info to me.

PHP 7.4 is apparently still the favourite, and actually growing. The 8s are otherwise taking over, especially combined.

USA and Germany still biggest and getting bigger.

USA English and German are still out ahead, although Chinese made relatively large headway this month.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

If the above spreadsheet doesn’t show properly, view the spreadsheet here.

The Details

It’s Been a While

Ok so it’s been around 2 years since my last transparency report. Oups. Changes to my professional life (going from being just being a contractor to having a full-time gig with Pacific Rim Early Childhood Institute) and personal life changes (mostly kids have gotten bigger and stay up later) have made consistently improving PMB difficult. I’ll mention in a second what just changed to allow PMB to get some more attention in a moment…

Paid for a Professional Logo

Back in January 2024, I released a new logo to PMB. I had hired a friend I met through the local WordPress meetup, Patrice Snopkowski, to make me a design. She did a great job taking my incoherent thoughts about “not wanting another logo of a printer” and turning it into something pretty cool.

Pre-January 2024 Logo (by me)

Post-January 2024 Logo (by Patrice)

The logo is meant to basically be digital bits of data turning into a document (eg a blog getting turned into a stack of paper or document files). I think it puts a better foot forward than the old one, and best off doesn’t actively have the WordPress logo in it (which I understood was OK, because all images of Wapuu, the sorta official WordPress mascot, were GPL-licensed, meaning anyone could use them so long as they also made what they made GPL-licensed too).

The logo’s colours originally matched better with WordPress’ websites colours, but not long after the wordpress.org website updated their colour palette. Oh well.

I had planed to update the colour scheme on printmy.blog to match too, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

Mailing List Woes

Ok so I switched over from MailChimp to using Mautic, which looked slick: Mautic is free, open-source, and pretty full of features too.

The only trouble was: after I used it to successfully send out one email to my list, it had some sort of error and my entire Mautic site went down. I contacted my hosting company (I didn’t have anything special, I installed Mautic using their one-click install tool) but they really never figured it out. And I can’t really blame them that much: it’s been cheap enough hosting that it’s really not feasible for them to have someone looking into it for more than an hour, and it sounded like it took longer.

I bet I’ll crawl back to MailChimp, and bleed the $150+ dollars per month in order to contact my mailing list (which was ballooned quite a bit over the past 2 years). I think I will trim down the mailing list though, get rid of anyone who doesn’t actually read any emails, to reduce on costs.

Got Some Help!

Finally, why I’m able to spend time on this post: I’ve finally gotten some help with PMB! An old friend of mine, Ryan Van de Kamp, accepted to help me out for as much as I could afford him. Ryan’s really got the typical WordPress career path: he’s self-taught himself web development, WordPress, mobile app development, React, and all the cool stuff. He’s also very emotionally intelligent too and an excellent communicator. He’s really probably over-qualified for this, but so far he’s happy doing it on the side. Lastly, he likes to think out of the box and come up with new stuff.

So expect to see super speedy replies to all support emails, improved documentation and marketing, and some new features. He’ll be doing next month’s transparency report, so I’ll let him tell y’all more about himself then.

Thinking Out Loud

Yippee I Have Help!

I’m really happy with the friendliness, expertise, and creativity Ryan has brought to the team.

The past few months especially have been fairly consistently above $1000 in revenue, which lets me afford hiring help. It’s really not enough to have Ryan working full-time, but it’s enough to have Ryan working more hours than I usually managed. Once he’s really familiar with PMB’s codebase I think we can especially expect some cool stuff.

What’s Next?

I’m kinda letting Ryan decide. I think we’re mostly focused on staying on top of support, and improving some marketing stuff. But that work is also informing us about what features will have the biggest payoff. We’ll see…