Does it worth selling your WordPress plugins on Codecanyon? (a report)

About two weeks ago I asked the community if it worth selling a premium WordPress plugin on marketplaces like Codecanyon or it’s better to choose a different path.

To answer that question, instead of relying on my intuitions, I decided to do my homework and I made a "report" based on the information available on Codecanyon.

I used a manual data collection method (aka copy-paste 😄). I checked 30 of the most popular items in the WordPress category, and I also listed plugins that were published about 6 months and about 1 year ago. I checked a total of 90 plugins.

So the answer to the question "Does it worth selling your premium WordPress plugin on Codecanyon" is: for me, it doesn’t. For others? It depends.

🤑
The average (lifetime) profit for popular plugins was about 1 272 000 USD (~13 861 USD profit/month). But! The average age of these plugins is almost 6 and a half years.

The average profit for a plugin that was launched about 6 months ago is 451 USD (about 87 USD profit/month).

For a plugin that is 1 year old, the profit was 792 USD (about 67 USD profit/month).

There was a really popular plugin in the 6 months range that made 698 sales, 97 022 USD in revenue, and about 64 326 USD in profit. That’s more than 10 700 USD / month. This is where I saw the real power of Codecanyon. The plugin was featured on the platform and I’m sure that helped to reach the number of sales mentioned above.
I also think it wasn’t the platform alone but the problem the seller is solving with the product. The plugin costs 139 USD which is much higher than an average premium WP plugin. Still, 698 people were happy to pay that fee.

Then why I say it isn’t worth it for me to sell my plugins there? Because of the business model. I already did the math on that and I don’t know why I keep "forgetting" it.
Long story short: without a recurring business model you need to acquire new customers all the time to make money. And that’s really, really hard. Codecanyon can help you with that by putting your product in front of a huge amount of potential customers. But on a market that is as crowded as premium WordPress plugins, I don’t know if that’s enough.

👉 The full report is available here 👈

💡 One more thing I noticed is that even though some of the plugins were relatively new, someone nulled them already and made them available for free. This is another thing that makes it harder to make money with products like these.

⚠️ Important notes:

• the data I used in the report was collected on 2020.11.19.
• to calculate the revenue and profit I used the price that was available on the site at the time I collected the information, but it could have been different in the past
• to calculate the Exclusive and Non-exclusive author fees, I used the information that was available here at the time I collected the information: https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000472943-Envato-Author-Fee-Schedule
• for the buyer fee, I used the information that was available here at the time I collected the information (WordPress - Regular License - 5 USD): https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000473203-Fixed-Buyer-Fees-on-Envato-Market#codecanyon
• to identify if someone is an exclusive seller or not, I was looking for the exclusive seller badge on the plugins’ pages and I also made a few searches to find out if the plugin is available to buy outside of Codecanyon
• I don’t know what the real profit was as I have no information about any additional expenses of sellers
• Envato has an Elite Author Program that can make you some extra money if you made a defined amount of sales (you can learn more about it here https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039107471) and this wasn’t added to the calculation