It’s been a whole year since my last transparency report! I intentionally decided to do this earlier in the year so that the growth of BNFW became more apparent as sometimes, not a lot can happen in 3-months, but in a year, a lot can. So here’s everything that happened with BNFW in 2018 along with some sales figures.

What’s New

This year has been a great year for BNFW. Everything seems to have gone up: number of downloads, number of active installs (now over 20,000!), user and customer reviews, add-on sales, etc, etc.

I’ve released 8 updates to the core BNFW plugin with one being the massive 1.7 release, with a heavy focus on comments / commenting / commenters. I also released two new add-ons: the long-awaited Multisite add-on and the GDPR-friendly Subscriptions add-on. All have been well received.

The other add-ons have seen less updates than i’d like but that will change next year as my focus is mainly on improving the existing add-ons, particularly Custom Fields and Conditional Notifications, with some heavily requested features. Keep an eye out for those.

I also spent some time in the first half of the year re-designing the site from the ground up using Beaver Builder and a custom child theme. This gives me much more flexibility when it comes to design and arrangement of the site and allows me to quickly make changes without having to always open up my code editor. So far this has worked out great and I feel the site is more organised and easier to navigate. Reviews for premium add-ons are now also available to read and leave on the site.

 

Expenditure

Developer & Consultants

Costs of hiring a developer and consultants for 2018: £4,995.00.

For reference, sales of BNFW add-ons have covered the all the developer’s costs since sometime in 2017.

Infrastructure

I won’t go into all the nitty gritty of daily running costs as they can vary a little through-out the year however, what I can say is that I feel BNFW, as a business, runs about as lean as it can at the moment. Total direct running costs for the business in 2018 are £1,932.36. Roughly speaking, this includes the following:

• Domain
• Hosting
• WordPress Plugins
• SendGrid
• Mailchimp
• Amazon AWS
• Zapier
• Payment Gateway Fees

My Time

Approximately 2-hours / day at £30 / hr: £13,320.00

Not much to say here except for this is my biggest debt – I won’t be officially profitable until my time has been paid off too. Providing everything continues to progress in the same way over the next few years however, this should take around 2-3 more years to accomplish.

Sales

I no long have the advanced levels of reporting which used to be handled via a plugin in Easy Digital Download (that may change when they release 3.0) however, I can say that the total for sales and renewals in 2018 (to date) comes to £15,908.56. This is a good 60% jump when compared to the same timeframe in 2017 which only totalled £9,912.83.

Even with my time accounted for, I actually had, not just my first, but 5 profitable months in 2018!

Whilst good, sales have been a little flat this year, as the below graph shows, but I think this will improve over time as the plugin continues to grow, gains users, more value is added to the add-ons, and so on. I’m looking at it from all angles.

For full transparency, total sales since January 2016 come to £28,834.69. This graph looks a little more encouraging (lines moving from bottom left to top right), if a little sporadic at times this year.

Stats

Website

Sessions: 48,001
Users: 48,523
Page Views: 98,782

Mailing List

Subscribers: 750

I removed a lot of subscribers back in May after the GDPR came into effect. I now see my mailing list as genuinely interested people and users of the plugin.

Support Tickets

I’ve answered quite a lot of support threads that have been created on the Free Support Forum. Any unanswered threads are due to bugs awaiting fixes or awaiting additional information from users. I don’t have exact numbers as it’s hard to find out from WP.org. I can honestly say that the improvement to the website seems to have caused a slight drop in support requests overall, even if Priority Support tickets have risen slightly, mostly due to the increase in sales, I believe.

I’ve closed 94 of 95 Priority Support tickets which have been opened by purchasers of a BNFW add-on.

Plugin Stats

Average Rating: 5/5
Total Downloads: 278,186
Active Installs: 20,000+

What’s Next

A lot of updates to existing add-ons, and some compatibility updates for BNFW. Probably a block for the new Block Editor that came with WP 5.0 (Gutenberg) for the front-end form in the Subscriptions add-on too.
As always, if you’d like to stay in the loop about new add-ons, please consider signing-up to the mailing list.

Until next year, have a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Jack, Better Notifications for WordPress