Lessons for WordPress Plugin Developers Starting a SaaS

BySteve Burge

We are WordPress plugin developers who are building a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform here at Logtivity.

Logtivity is a WordPress activity log, built with Laravel.

Coming from a WordPress plugin development environment, it should be easy, right? Both WordPress and Laravel are built with PHP. How hard can it be? In reality, we’ve faced a really steep learning curve.

I’ve been talking with other WordPress friends who want to start SaaS. They develop successful plugins and want to branch out to launch a SaaS project. So I’ve collected the lessons we’ve learned from Logtivity over the last couple of years.

What do plugin developers need to know before starting their SaaS? I’ve combined our lessons learned with those from my WordPress friends.

Business lessons

  1. Don’t treat this as a side hustle. It’s very possible to run a plugin as a successful part-time job. If it’s built right, they don’t require much maintenance or support. A SaaS service requires constant love and hard work to succeed. Take the example of WPUmbrella’s founders who didn’t pay themselves for the first two years despite working on the project full-time. Bryce at Metorik took about a year of full-time focus to start replacing his salary. Up to this point, we had tried to run Logtivity as a side-hustle. It’s only now we have a full-time developer on the project that we’re seeing real progress.
  2. You’re entering a different price segment. The price of your SaaS service will be higher than your plugins. Logtivity costs only $1 per site per month, but our average customer pays $17 per month. That’s about double the revenue we get from plugin customers. This doesn’t result in more support tickets, but it does mean you need to provide more value.
  3. WordPress users need educating on the value of SaaS. WordPress customers don’t act like non-WordPress customers. People in the WordPress space are accustomed to paying $50 to $100 per year for plugins or occasionally a multiple of that for a lifetime deal. They’ve become comfortable in that price range and often have many years of experience paying those prices. It takes more effort to sell a SaaS product to a WordPress user because it’s outside their comfort zone.
  4. Don’t pick a small niche. You can start in a small niche, but you need to quickly expand. The price is higher, so users expect more value. For example, we started with an activity log but pivoted and are looking to expand into more areas of logging. Is your SaaS idea capable of pivoting and growing? The best example I’ve seen is probably Lemon Squeezy who started as WordPress-adjacent before moving into a wider eCommerce nice.

Growth lessons

  1. User onboarding is more difficult. Users can’t just install a plugin from WordPress.org. At the very least, they need to create an account. They also most likely need to install a plugin and also add a credit card. There’s considerably more friction before your customers get to experience your product.
  2. Learn about data storage. Do you have a data processing agreement? Can you meet ISO security standards? Do you know what either of those things are? We never needed to as plugin developers, but we do know now.
  3. Finding the right staff is harder. You need people with a good understanding of both WordPress and the framework of the SaaS platform. For example, we use Laravel to build Logtivity. Developers tend to be really strong with PHP, or with the framework. WordPress, Laravel, NodeJS and others are separate communities and people find their niches inside them. It’s not easy to find someone who’s ready to solve problems in WordPress and your framework.

Technical lessons

  1. Uptime is YOUR problem. Not the customer’s. That’s a quote from Devin Walker, the creator of GiveWP. This is very different from a plugin where uptime is not your responsibility at all. Be prepared for problems at any time of the day.
  2. It’s time to learn server administration. With a plugin, you may only need to keep your website up. With a SaaS service, be prepared to learn Amazon, Google Cloud etc. Victor Drover from Watchful says, “Better learn cloud infrastructure ASAP. You’re not getting away with a basic hosting account or simple VPS.”
  3. Velocity is much more important. Plugin customers often value stability and small, incremental changes. This is the safe option because your plugin is used in so many different environments. A SaaS platform requires a fundamentally different approach. You can and should move much faster.
  4. The technical challenge is different. I asked Bill, our lead developer, what it was like to dive into Laravel work from a traditional PHP background. Here’s his answer in full:

With plugin development, you create functionality within the context of a platform like WordPress. You have well-defined methods for handling the basic tasks required of any CMS. WordPress tells you exactly what’s required for input filtering/validation or retrieval/storage and the database is clearly defined. Plugins are discrete packages and users can decide to download or update your plugin. This means discrete releases with release numbers and milestones. It’s a fairly controlled process where bugs can be fixed in the next release or rolled back if the new release turns out to be too broken.

In contrast, your SaaS application is the platform. The job is to create the well-defined context for other system to write to. It could be a CMS such as WordPress or an API such as Stripe or Slack. There are no discrete releases or milestones. You can set your own rhythm for releases and customers rarely have to choose about whether to update. You end up moving away from changelogs, release versions, and milestones. The only constraints are whatever are the goals of the codebase and performing them well, safely and efficiently.

It’s not better or worse to build a SaaS product rather than a plugin, but the technical challenge is absolutely different.

Nick G left a comment focusing on the fact that you’re no long working in a pre-defined framework:

There’s no strict standard you need to follow, like in WordPress, so you can move faster. Learn infrastructure basics, load balancing, and start exploring frameworks like Next.js. It’s an awesome choice because it combines both backend and frontend in a single package.

More to learn

Check out the talks from Aaron Edwards the founder of DocsBot.ai, including “SaaSifying Your WP Product“