Comparison

LicensorPro vs Freemius

Freemius is a hosted platform that takes a cut of every sale and acts as your merchant of record. LicensorPro is software you run yourself for a flat subscription. Both sell WordPress plugins; they are not really the same product, and which one is right depends almost entirely on how much you sell and how much you want to own.

Figures below are from Freemius's own published pricing page, checked 30 July 2026. We make our money if you choose us, so read the section on what Freemius does better — it is there because it is true, and if it describes you then Freemius is the right answer.

The money, concretely

Freemius charges 4.7% of revenue, plus a 2.3% WordPress surcharge, plus gateway fees. Call it about 7% plus gateway for a normal WordPress plugin business. The 4.7% steps down as monthly revenue grows — 4.5% above $50k/month, 4.0% above $60k, and so on down to 0.5% above $100k/month.

LicensorPro is a flat subscription — Solo $79/year, Studio $199/year, Agency $499/year — and takes 0% of what you sell. You pay your own gateway (Stripe is typically 2.9% + 30¢) and keep the rest.

What Freemius does that we do not

This is the part most comparison pages leave out. These are real, and for some sellers each one on its own is reason enough to pay the percentage.

• Merchant of record, including sales tax and VAT. Freemius is the legal seller. They collect, file and remit sales tax and VAT worldwide, and it is genuinely a lot of work you never have to think about. LicensorPro does not do this at all — we store a tax figure your gateway reports and nothing more. If you want tax handled for you, you either stay with Freemius or put a merchant of record (Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy) in front of LicensorPro, which re-introduces a percentage.
• Install analytics and insights. Freemius's SDK reports usage back, so you can see activations, deactivations and uninstall reasons. LicensorPro deliberately has no telemetry — our own plugins advertise that they phone home for nothing but licence checks, and we are not going to ship the opposite. That is a principled choice, not a roadmap gap, and if you want install analytics we are the wrong tool.
• In-plugin marketing tooling. Upgrade prompts, trials-without-payment, review requests and promotional campaigns rendered inside the WordPress admin. We give you an SDK and a licence gate; the upsell UI is yours to write.
• A marketplace and an existing audience. Freemius has a large community of plugin makers and a support team that has seen every edge case. You are buying that too.
• Nothing to run. No server, no updates, no backups, no PHP version to keep current.

What LicensorPro does that Freemius does not

• You keep the customer relationship. Emails, licence keys and payment records live in your database, on your server. You can query it, export it, and email your own list without asking anyone.
• Your choice of gateway, and the money lands in your account. Nineteen drivers ship with it — Stripe, PayPal, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Mollie, Razorpay and more — with per-country routing, so a buyer in India sees a processor that works there. With a merchant of record you are paid out on their schedule; here you are paid on your gateway's.
• Costs stop scaling. A flat subscription means a good year does not cost you more.
• No platform risk. Nobody can change the rate, change the terms, or decide your plugin is no longer welcome. If we disappeared tomorrow the software keeps running on your server.
• Not only WordPress. There is a dependency-free PHP client for licensing any script or application against the same API, so a plugin business that grows a SaaS side does not need a second system.

Feature by feature

Which one should you actually pick

Choose Freemius if…

• You want sales tax and VAT to be somebody else's problem. This is the strongest single reason.
• You are early, selling very little, and want to think about product rather than infrastructure.
• You want install analytics and in-plugin marketing tooling out of the box.
• You do not want to run a server, ever.

Choose LicensorPro if…

• You are selling enough that 7% is real money you would rather keep.
• You want your customer list in your own database, queryable and exportable.
• You already have a merchant of record you are happy with, and only need the licensing layer.
• You sell something that is not a WordPress plugin, or expect to.
• Platform risk bothers you on principle.

Moving from Freemius

Export your customers and licence keys, import them, and point your plugin at the new API URL in your next release. Existing keys keep working — the SDK validates against whatever endpoint it is told to. The awkward part is not the data, it is that your subscriptions live on Freemius's gateway and have to be re-created on yours; there is no way around that with any platform. Email us before you start and we will look at your actual setup rather than guessing.

See LicensorPro pricing Or compare against Easy Digital Downloads →