Preface: I have no problem with CodeCanyon, or being rejected. The guys running CodeCanyon know much better then me how to run their business, and if they rejected my plugin they probably thought it will not sell, at least not in the amount worth their trouble.
I submitted my simple google authorship and avatar plugin to CodeCanyon to test if it is possible to make money from developing and selling general purpose wordpress plugins. Hoping that with proper coding and documentation I might be able to get some more money every month without having to talk/convince/argue with clients which is the most stressful part of being freelancer.
The plugin was designed to be simple (as the name implies 😉 ) in two ways
- For the user – simple to use, as I want to reduce the amount of time I might need to spend in answering questions about how to use it
- For me – simple to code and maintain as it was a test in which I didn’t want to commit too much time because I had no idea what will be the return on the time investment.
Of course simple is too often confused with trivial, and this plugin wasn’t totally trivial as I had to create a proxy server for it to be able to easily access data by using google API.
I estimate that it took me 5 days to write the plugin including research, coding, QA and documentation. I charge at least 50$ per hour for freelance work and assuming I worked 8 hours a day my time investment into creating the plugin was worth about 2k$. Even before starting coding, when I just decided on the scope of the plugin I knew there was little chance that I will sell enough of it to return the development effort.
The rejection letter suggested that I will add more meat to the plugin. For me it was wrong in two ways
- The google API I used, accessed publicly available information from the user’s google profile and therefor required only “read” permission which I assume users will be more likely to give. The plugin already utilized any aspect of the specific API and there is just nothing else that can be done with it. Adding functionality from other APIs is possible but then I will most likely end up with two functionality, each deserving a plugin by itself, forced to live in one plugin just to make it sellable
- I already invested 2k$ worth of my time into this, and I’m totally not convinced that if I invest another 2k$ I will have a better chance of earning 4k$ in reasonable time. I lost ( a little imaginary) 2k$, no point in being in the position of losing 4k$.
The thing is that I might do much better by releasing the plugin under the GPL license into the wordpress plugin repository. Since the documentation can be bare bones and I am not required to support the plugin if I don’t want to, the development cost is lower and I might get better money from donations or requests for modification (realistically neither will happen but no one guaranties minimum amount of sells in codecanyon as well). In the minimum it will increase my reputation as a wordpress developer.