As of Today, We’re Giving Everything Away… For Free!

Happy Friday :) We’re now giving away every single one of our premium plugins and services 100% free for you to keep and enjoy forever. We’re breaking WordPress.

For waaaay too long premium plugins and themes have been constrained by, you know, being “premium.” How do you know whether you like a plugin or enjoy a theme framework when you have to cough up the dough beforehand?

And then, they are either limited to the number of sites you can use them on or use licences that mean you can’t do whatever you want with them whenever, despite the best efforts of the powers that be.

Well, today that ends. Today we are turning over a brand new page in the WordPress marketplace. Today you have absolutely zero excuses not to sign up because today you can join WPMU DEV entirely for free.

You’ll get access to all of our services, including Hummingbird, Defender, Smush Pro, and 24/7/365 expert WordPress support.

Wait, What? Free… As in Free Beer?

Don’t much like the services? No stress, you cancel anytime during your free trial period, and without obligation you can keep and continue to use every plugin and every theme we provide forever on as many sites as you like. You can even go and resell them (although, y’now, please don’t. And hey, you’ll struggle to compete with us giving our products away for free!)

I know what you’re thinking. Are we completely insane? Have we lost our marbles? Has Farmer finally scaled the summit of lunacy and flipped? Are they drunk?

Well, possibly.

Or, possibly not.

In the Race to the Bottom, You Win

You see, here’s the punt I’m taking. I’m betting that the value of digital products in this market is only going to fall, massively. Huge players like Envato are obsessed with driving prices down (because they can afford to) to cement their market position, and other players, like Automattic, aren’t interested in selling $19 plugins, they just want a user-base with occasional WordPress.com upsells, and they can spend vast sums of money getting towards that.

The days of making a living out of selling plugins and themes is limited unless you’re at the absolute top of the tree, and even then you’re at the mercy of the 10 ton gorillas slugging it out in the neighborhood.

And y’know, I’ve always believed that the real value of WPMU DEV hasn’t actually been in the plugins and themes we’ve provided, it’s been the astonishingly good support (WordPress support businesses, pffffft – we’ve been doing it for years unofficially!), it’s the constant updates and upgrades, it’s services like Smush Pro and now Hummingbird, Defender and more, it’s the community and our constant striving to provide our members with a better and better experience.

So this means that finally we can release all of our plugins for free, 100% GPL, all yours.

Bring it on.

So why not give it a go and let me know if you think I’ve gone truly batty or not.

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