Transparency Report of September 2023

Overview

This is the 52nd 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.

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

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

What Happened This Month

Downloads

No releases to wp.org this month so only weekly fluctuations.

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

About 200 more email subscribers in the last month.

Website Visits

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

No big progress in terms of website visitors this month.

Freemius Stats

Sales

Sales back up to the average in September.

Sales up slightly, but no refunds helped improve over August.

Still lots of hobbyist license sales, no new business licenses. Most of these hobbyist users haven’t required much support, so I shouldn’t begrudge them, but of course I’d rather they went for the professional license.

Active subscriptions up marginally, but with 9 new and 5 cancelled, an increase of 4 feels more like a fluctuation than solid progress.

Monthly subscriptions still quite high.

Oh right, there’s a 20-site monthly license renewal for a university this month, which offsets all subscriptions being single-license subscriptions.

Audience

Growth seems steady about 120 new net users each month.

Active installs up quite a goodly amount, actually. (Reminder that my active installs were negative for a year or so because of a edge case bug in how Freemius reported them.)

The number of 3.3 users hasn’t changed in the last month. That’s actually an interesting indicator. Those 292 users haven’t updated it, but nor have they deactivated it or had their sites shut down.

Obviously WP 6.3, still the most recent version, is the biggest grower.

PHP 7.4 is the favourite and growing the fastest (I suppose PHP 8.x breaks compatibility with a bunch of stuff so folks are hesitant to switch to it.)

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

The Details

Measurements Article Added

I added a new article to the User Manual titled “Units of Length and Getting Sizes Right” in September 2023. It addresses something I honestly hadn’t ever concretely figured out:

converting between pixels, points, inches and centimeters
default page dimensions (height, width, page margins, and font sizes)

This is especially helpful when trying to get an image of the right size to fit on a page with PMB’s Pro PDF Service.

Again Tracking Active Installs

Since August 2022, when WordPress.org stopped sharing the Active Install Growth, my transparency reports really haven’t shown plugin growth.

I could have switched to only using Freemius’ stats for active installs, but it has a bug that counts deactivations of non-opted-in sites withtout ever counting them as activations. And because there was a year there where I removed Freemius’ opt-in screen, and consequently there were very few opt-ins, but still a normal number of deactivations, Freemius started showing active installs as negative. So it’s not great by itself either.

So, I decided to use the WordPress.org-derived numbers until they were no longer available, and then use the change in Freemius’ opted-in sites to the more recent months.

According to this method, PMB should have broken 6,000 active installs this month, but wp.org still shows it as 5,xxx, and Freemius shows it as 268 (which is certainly wrong, as it was negative until recently) or 2,949 (according to the counts of PHP versions). So which is right? They’re each partially right and wrong:

wp.org (5,xxx) shows the total number of users of the free plugin, but only gives 1 significant digit
Freemius’ “Active installs” (268) would be good except it counted deactivations of non-opted in sites and so was negative for a couple years, so obviously wrong
Freemius’ count of sites using various PHP versions (2,949) doesn’t seem buggy, but it excludes all sites that didn’t opt in
my mix (wp.org until August 2022, then add Freemius’ monthly growth, 6061) shows all sites until August 2022 then shows new opt-ins

Data from Jan 2019 to September 2023, showing active installs (blue), income (orange), and expenses (grey). Active installs slowed down with the addion of Freemius, expenses (most of which are opportunity cost) went up, but within the last year income has also shot up significantly, nearly reaching half of the expenses.

Thinking Out Loud

Transparency Reports are Back on Track!

I admit I don’t have much to report right now, as last month was slow for getting stuff done on the plugin, and the previous month’s transparency report took nearly a month to publish. But at least now this month’s is being reported in a timely fashion.

Phew, Income is Up!

As you can see in the previous graph, while expenses (mostly opportunity cost- or money I could have made if I were consistently earning a wage for my time) have been growing pretty steadily, total income has nearly doubled in the the last year (compared to 4 previous years).

It’s just interesting running a business: I wanted my income to match my input and effort, but they’re really totally unrelated. The times when I put in the most time into PMB (probably 2020, when I was making the pro version) really had no improvement in income. And now, when I haven’t been able to commit as much time to it as previously, income has been up significantly.

If anything there seems to be about a year or two’s gap between effort and payback. So I quite expect that if I don’t put as much into it for a year, I’ll probably see that reflected in income in about a year or two.

What’s Next?

For the 5th month in a row, I’m hoping to start working migrating from MailChimp to Mautic. Then Pro Print buttons, but that will be a big task and I haven’t worked out how exactly I want it to work.