There are four realistic ways to license and sell a Pro version of a WordPress plugin. You can use an all-in-one platform such as Freemius, which takes a share of revenue and acts as your merchant of record. You can run a store inside WordPress with Easy Digital Downloads and its Software Licensing extension. You can put a payments service that handles tax (Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar) in front of a separate licensing server. Or, for the simplest products, you can sell a zip through Gumroad or a marketplace and accept that updates are on you.<\/p>\n
Short version of who each suits: Freemius if you are starting out and want tax and payments off your plate. EDD if you already run a WordPress site you trust and want no revenue share. A payments service plus a licensing server once the percentage starts to hurt and you want to own the customer list. Gumroad if a download link is honestly all you need. The rest of this post is the reasoning, the numbers, and the decisions every route still leaves you to make.<\/p>\n
Prices are as of October 2026, taken from each vendor’s own pricing page (last checked 27 August 2026). We make one of the products in this space, and it gets a single, clearly marked section near the end. Everything above it would read the same if we did not.<\/p>\n
Most comparisons put seven logos in a table and let you guess. The useful move is to notice that “selling a plugin” is two jobs that happen to sit next to each other:<\/p>\n
Some products do both. Most do one. A merchant of record and a licensing server are not alternatives to each other, and plenty of working setups use one of each, joined by a webhook. The genuine either\/or is between a platform that does both for a percentage and assembling the two halves yourself. We laid this out at more length on our licensing options compared<\/a> page, with sources for each row.<\/p>\n Freemius is the default answer for WordPress plugin authors, and for good reasons. It is your merchant of record, so it collects and remits sales tax and VAT. It handles checkout, subscriptions and licence keys, and its SDK delivers Pro updates into WordPress. You never run a server. It also gives you install analytics and in-plugin upgrade tooling, which you would otherwise build yourself.<\/p>\n The cost is a revenue share, and the number most articles quote is wrong for plugin sellers. Freemius lists a base share of 4.7%<\/strong> on monthly gross up to $50,000, stepping down as volume grows (4.5% above $50,000 a month, down to 0.5% above $100,000). But its pricing page also lists “WordPress & Templates +2.3%<\/strong>“, and its FAQ confirms the surcharge. So a WordPress plugin seller pays about 7.0% plus gateway fees<\/strong>, not 4.7%.<\/p>\n A few other details from their page that matter: no fee on the tax component of a sale, no extra percentage for cart recovery or failed-renewal recovery, a $100 minimum payout, and monthly payouts via PayPal, Payoneer, Wise or wire.<\/p>\n Who it suits:<\/strong> anyone early, anyone selling modest amounts, anyone who never wants to think about VAT. The percentage costs you almost nothing when sales are small. The catch is that it never stops. At $10,000 a month, 7% is $700, every month. Our Freemius comparison<\/a> runs that arithmetic at several revenue levels, including the rows where Freemius is the better deal.<\/p>\n Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is a store that runs as a plugin on your own WordPress site. Its Software Licensing extension issues keys, tracks activations and serves updates to your customers’ sites. It takes no platform fee, so there is no revenue share to grow with your sales.<\/p>\n The catch is the tier. Software Licensing needs the Professional pass<\/strong>. EDD currently shows “special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price”, so quote both numbers: $299.50 for the first year, $599 a year on renewal<\/strong>. The Personal and Extended passes are cheaper but do not include licensing, so comparing against them is misleading.<\/p>\n You do get a lot for that: a real storefront with product pages, a cart, discounts and a large ecosystem of extensions and tutorials built up over many years. If your team knows WordPress and nothing else, it is one less system to learn.<\/p>\n The architectural trade-off is that your licence API now lives inside a WordPress site, next to your theme and every other plugin on it. A bad update or a clash on the store site is now an incident where customers cannot activate. If you have ever spent an afternoon on WordPress plugin conflicts<\/a>, you know that is not hypothetical. You can shrink that risk by running the store on its own lean install. Tax is also yours to file: EDD calculates it, but EDD is not a merchant of record.<\/p>\n Who it suits:<\/strong> sellers who already run a stable WordPress site, want a proper storefront, and would rather pay a flat yearly fee than a percentage. Our EDD comparison<\/a> calls this the closest contest in the whole field, and we stand by that.<\/p>\n This is the “assemble it yourself” route. A merchant of record takes the payment and handles tax. A licensing server, which you host or rent, issues keys and delivers updates. A webhook from the MoR tells the licensing server “this person paid”, and the server issues the key and sends the email.<\/p>\n The merchants of record most plugin authors look at:<\/p>\n For the licensing half you can rent a hosted API or run your own server. LicenseSpring is the best-known hosted option: a free plan with 1,000 requests a month and 1 product, Business Starter at $199 a month (10,000 requests, 3 products) and Business Plus at $750 a month. It is a general software licensing service, not WordPress-specific, so plan to write the WordPress update side yourself. Self-hosted servers, ours included, cost a flat yearly fee and you run them.<\/p>\n Some sellers skip the MoR and use a plain gateway such as Stripe, doing their own VAT. That is cheaper and a perfectly normal choice, but it is not the same deal as Freemius, so do not compare it as if it were.<\/p>\n Who it suits:<\/strong> sellers past the point where 7% is small change, anyone who wants the customer list in their own database, and anyone selling more than WordPress plugins (a desktop app, a PHP script) who wants one licensing system for all of it. The honest cost is that you are now wiring two vendors together and keeping one of them running.<\/p>\n Gumroad is the fastest way to start selling. 10% + $0.50<\/strong> per transaction through your own profile or direct links, 30%<\/strong> when a customer finds you through Gumroad Discover, no monthly charge.<\/p>\n It does have licence keys, and its API can verify, disable and rotate them. What it does not do is enforce anything for you. Gumroad’s own help docs say enforcement is “completely up to the creator”, and a key stays enabled after a refund until you disable it. There is no list of which sites a key is active on, and nothing reaches the customer’s wp-admin update screen: buyers download a new zip by hand. For an ebook that is fine. For a plugin, the update channel and the per-site list are the code you would be writing. Our Gumroad comparison<\/a> starts by saying “if a download link is enough, use Gumroad”, and we meant it.<\/p>\n Who it suits:<\/strong> a first paid add-on, a one-off tool, a test of whether anyone will pay at all.<\/p>\n Marketplaces like CodeCanyon sell your plugin to their existing buyers, which is the whole attraction: someone else brings the traffic. We have not verified their current author fees or terms, so we will not quote any. If you go this way, read the author agreement closely for three things: the commission at your price point, whether you can also sell the same plugin elsewhere, and how updates reach buyers. Those three decide whether the audience is worth what you give up.<\/p>\nThe routes, one by one<\/h2>\n
1. All-in-one platform: Freemius<\/h3>\n
2. WordPress store plus licensing add-on: Easy Digital Downloads<\/h3>\n
3. A merchant of record plus a separate licensing server<\/h3>\n
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4. Sell a file: Gumroad<\/h3>\n
5. Marketplaces such as CodeCanyon<\/h3>\n
The routes at a glance<\/h2>\n