What We Use To Sell Premium Plugins

I’ve just got an email from Josh who has purchased one of our plugins. He’d like to know how we run our plugin subscriptions.

What plugin is it that you use for your account subscriptions? I find it very nice and easy to use and would be a great plugin for a site I’m creating.

Josh W

I think it would be interesting to go through and list every plugin and service that we use to run Puri.io and handle subscriptions/plugins licenses etc. Let’s start at the top with hosting.

Note that I’ll provide affiliate links to some of these products. I believe in the companies behind them and use them every day.

Hosting

Puri.io is hosted on Vultr.com. I won’t too much into details, but here are some specifications.
We are using their High Frequency (VPS) server, 1 CPU, 1GB Ram with 32GB NVMe storage.

It’s important to know that Vultr gives us a fast blank server, so to make WordPress run smoothly we are using WordOps. WordOps is an open-source project that takes care of installing and managing our (Nginx) webserver with SSL and more. The team behind WordOps is awesome.

Plugins

As you’d already know using the self-hosted version of WordPress where we install plugins to help run our site.

The main plugin that runs our store is Easy Digital Downloads. We’ve got their All Access Pass. This gives us access to all their EDD extensions with one payment.

Easy Digital Downloads

We use the following official EDD plugins:

• Easy Digital Downloads – All Access
• Easy Digital Downloads – Auto Register
• Easy Digital Downloads – Block Editor
• Easy Digital Downloads – Discounts Pro
• Easy Digital Downloads – Invoices
• Easy Digital Downloads – MailChimp
• Easy Digital Downloads – Manual Purchases
• Easy Digital Downloads – PayPal Website Payments Pro and PayPal Express Gateway
• Easy Digital Downloads – PDF Invoices
• Easy Digital Downloads – Per Product Emails
• Easy Digital Downloads – Recurring Payments
• Easy Digital Downloads – Reviews
• Easy Digital Downloads – Software Licensing
• Easy Digital Downloads – Stripe Payment Gateway

Third-Party EDD Plugins

• Tabbed Account Area
• EDD Metrics – Great for quickly seeing sale stats.
• A few custom made EDD plugins.

The two important plugins to answer Josh’s questions are Software Licensing & Recurring Payments. Those two plugins allow us to sell subscriptions with license keys.

You might have noticed that we aren’t using WooCommerce to sell our own products. We choose Easy Digital Downloads to sell plugins because we saw bigger plugin stores use EDD. So we ran a comparison, we couldn’t find a WooCommerce solution for selling premium licensed plugins as easily.

General plugins:

• Another MailChimp Widget – Lightest Mailchimp plugin.
• BackWPup – Running quick backups.
• Cache Enabler – Simple caching, I’m experimenting with this one.
• DocsPress – Adding documentation for our plugins.
• Elementor Pro – A few of our landing pages are designed with Elementor.
• WP Mail Catcher – Making sure emails are sending
• Ninja Forms – Basically just for our support form.
• Query Monitor – Making sure our site is running as it should.
• Redirection – Auto creates redirects when changing the URL of any content.
• Site Kit by Google – Google Analytics.
• Syntax-highlighting Code Block – Code snippets in our documentation.
• WordFence – Firewall and Security.
• The SEO Framework – Great SEO plugin.
• WP Mail SMTP – For sending emails via MailGun.
• WP Toolbelt – Lightweight Jetpack alternative.

That’s all the plugins we are currently using. I’d be interested see what other plugin businesses are using for their setup.