The announcement you’ve all been waiting for: our dropshipping and marketplace plugins are now free for everyone, forever.
No hidden fees, no premium upgrades. Completely free, for unlimited sites, with full access to every feature.
Let me share why and how we got here.
Where we came from
Back in 2019, we started selling WooCommerce plugins. In our first 30 days, we gained 100 paid installs thanks to our partners. It was the kind of start you dream about.
By 2023, we hit a record month of €70k in revenue from plugin sales alone. We thought we were on our way to that magic million-dollar annual mark.
Then 2024 happened. Everything dropped, massively. We had to say goodbye to four team members. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. But it also pushed us to build something new: the WooCommerce Support service, focused on making WooCommerce sites faster.
In 2025, we started building Woosa Payments and in 2026 we launched it. By then, plugin sales had fallen to €15k MRR, a decrease of €35k in just two years.
Today, we’ve hired a Head of WooCommerce Support, and Woosa Payments is growing massively. That growth is exactly why we’re now in the position to give something back: to offer our dropshipping and marketplace plugins entirely for free and to start The Woosa Collective for agencies and developers.
The arrival of AI
I can’t talk about that drop without talking about AI, because I believe it’s at the heart of what changed.
Suddenly, anyone can code their own plugin. That’s genuinely exciting and it opens doors that were closed for years. But there’s another side to it. Code written this way isn’t necessarily good code and it certainly isn’t always safe code. The barrier to creating something dropped, while the barrier to creating something reliable stayed exactly where it was.
That’s why I’d argue experts are needed now more than ever, to help entrepreneurs navigate this era without putting their stores, their data or their customers at risk.
And the pressure is real across the whole ecosystem. Entrepreneurs are finding it harder to get by and even large players feel it. Elementor recently announced significant layoffs, with AI cited as a driving factor. When a company of that size feels the shift, you know it’s reshaping the ground beneath all of us.
Why this matters beyond Woosa
This announcement isn’t only about us. It’s about the WordPress community and everyone working hard to build something profitable within it.
I’ve worked with WordPress and WooCommerce since I was 23 years old. I’m 35 now and I fell in love with it for two reasons: its open source DNA and the sheer flexibility the platform offers. That love hasn’t faded.
At the same time, I’ll be honest about something that worries me. As WordPress grew, many people jumped onto the platform and not everyone brought the same level of craft. That created prejudices that stuck and it’s one of the reasons many e-commerce stores today reach for SaaS platforms like Shopify instead. The simplicity is appealing, I understand that completely.
But that simplicity often comes with complete dependence on a single platform, something people seem to take for granted. I see the same pattern in how readily we now hand our daily tasks over to AI. It’s a trend that genuinely concerns me and I’ll always be an advocate for reducing dependency in any form. Open source and the freedom it gives you to own your own stack, is the antidote.
For the past months, I’ve heard one thing again and again: selling WordPress and WooCommerce plugins is hard. We’ve experienced this first-hand, as our own numbers clearly show. Earning revenue as a plugin business is tougher than it’s been in a long time.
And there’s a deeper challenge worth naming kindly: so much of what makes WordPress wonderful, the events, the plugin repository, the shared knowledge, runs mainly on the generosity of volunteers. That’s a beautiful thing, but it also means individual contributors and small businesses often carry a lot without an easy path to sustainability. Programs exist to help, but for many smaller players, the volume and economics simply haven’t added up yet.
So I started thinking. With everything we’ve built so far, Woosa is in a strong position to help take this community and its users to the next level.
Not just by opening up our expertise, plugins, and services, but by building The Woosa Collective: a model where everyone who contributes value can share in the rewards.
What we’re aiming for
We have three goals:
- Make it easy and affordable to start with WooCommerce as a store owner.
- Offer a dedicated WooCommerce support desk for everyone working with it.
- Create a collective earning model for developers, agencies and plugin sellers.
This won’t be easy and we’ll need the community to pull it off. We’re looking for moderators and experts for the Woosa Community, plugin developers seeking a new sales channel and people who want to stand behind and promote Woosa Payments.
We want to help you generate more sales and also let you earn within The Woosa Collective through Woosa Payments. Everyone who is proactively involved in realizing our mission will receive a share of the profit it generates, regardless of referral input. We simply reward you for your time, dedication and support of our shared mission: to make WooCommerce matter again.
If you have questions or think you can bring value to this mission, please reach out. I’m open to discussing every opportunity to grow together.
