It’s been three months since my last transparency report so here’s everything that’s been going on for BNFW in the third quarter of 2017.

What’s New

This Summer has disappeared! I’ve been working incredibly hard lately and it’s meant that BNFW has been lagging behind. Luckily, I’m through the thick of it now which means BNFW is back on my radar and I’ve been busy planning and prioritising development for the next 3-6 months, particularly on the lead up to Christmas. Lots of great stuff is coming, including some powerful improvements and updates to the Custom Fields and Conditional add-ons – providing that my ideas aren’t too lofty and are achievable, of course!

There’s been some significant updates to two of the add-ons. The ‘Per-post Override’ add-on is now called ‘Global Override’ and the ‘Update Reminder’ add-on is now called ‘Reminders’. These were necessary changes to reflect the large improvements that have been made to both of these add-ons, as well as catering to future plans for them too.

I’d love to say that the Multisite add-on is still coming however, at the moment, I’ve had to put it on hold. The cost to complete the development is just too high and a recent survey of users on the mailing list revealed that it’s not necessarily what everyone is looking for with regards to add-ons for BNFW. As such, I’ve had to switch development to a new add-on: I’m pleased to announce full support for the incredibly popular Profile Builder plugin (both Free and Pro versions) is coming as a new add-on very shortly. Keep an eye out for that one.

I recently started using Freemius in an effort to better understand BNFW users and see if there are any areas in which I can improve. It has given me a lot of useful insight but I think the most beneficial feature it has, is it’s ability to help me grow my mailing list from a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers in a matter of months. This, combined with an automated set of email surveys for new users, has given me some really helpful insight and has allowed me to re-organise the development roadmap both for the core free plugin, and new add-ons and which plugins I need to provide better support for.

Another recent development has been in hosting. I started using a UK-based Managed WordPress host for the BNFW website however, the experience was less than optimal and I ended up moving to Cloudways instead so that I could have a cloud-based site that was more easily scalable when needed, whilst also making full use of their transactional email service instead of relying on SMTP. This, albeit with a bit of a learning curve, has been a good move and the site is responding better to traffic and is now situated on the West coast of the US – an area where most BNFW users seem to be.

It’s worth noting that whilst my focus has moved more towards producing add-ons for BNFW this past year, this is only because I have managed to achieve so much of what I initially set out to do with the free core plugin. New features for BNFW are coming as free updates via WordPress.org and I’ve got some great ideas lined up – I just need to be able to intersperse them better with releasing new add-ons and updates to existing ones, whilst also being able to support myself when providing support and dealing with the ever growing user base that uses BNFW, something I’m incredibly proud of and find some of the most pleasant people I’ve ever met.

Expenditure

Developer

Cost of hiring a developer for this period: £1,275.00

Infrastructure

Domain & Hosting: £21.94
WordPress Plugins – £27.00
Freemius – £84.16
Zapier Basic Plan – £45.99
Amazon AWS: £0.84
SilverSiphon: £20.61
Stripe Fees: £44.32
PayPal Fees: £84.11

My Time

Approximately 2-hours / day at £30 / hr: £3,600.00

Sales

Sales of Custom Fields add-on: £1,102.19
Sales of Global Override add-on: £316.60
Sales of Reminders add-on: £325.60
Sales of Conditional Notifications add-on: £1,781.20
Sales of Send to Any Email add-on: £451.14

Total Sales & Renewals: £3,976.73

Stats

Website

Sessions: 15,113
Users: 8,097
Page Views: 29,945

Mailing List

Subscribers: 2,060

Support Tickets

I’ve answered of 41 out of 47 support threads that have been created on the Free Support Forum within the past 2-months. Any unanswered threads are due to bugs awaiting fixes or awaiting additional information from users.

I’ve closed 39 of 39 Priority Support tickets which have been opened by purchasers of a BNFW add-on.

Plugin Stats

Average Rating: 5/5
Total Downloads: 141,398
Active Installs: 10,000+

What’s Next

The Profile Builder add-on, updates to existing add-ons, and some compatibility updates for BNFW, all before Christmas!
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 time, have a lovely, leafy Autumn / Fall!