How to make a living with WordPress

The slide deck from a talk I gave at WordCamp Detroit on November 12, 2011. The deck, “Make money by giving it away for free, or how to make a living with WordPress”, is the same one I delivered three days earlier at a WordCamp Toronto event. Two cities, one weekend, one argument about how the WordPress economy actually works for the people in it.

WordPress in late 2011

Late 2011 sat in the WordPress 3.2 to 3.3 cycle. Custom post types had landed the year before and were finally being used at scale. Multisite was normalizing. The block editor was four years away from any visible roadmap. WordPress was actively shedding its blogging-only reputation and starting to be taken seriously as a general content management platform, and the freelance and small-agency economy around it was figuring out how to bill for that work.

Why the argument is louder now

The core argument of the talk was that giving your WordPress expertise away freely, through open-source plugins, community participation, and free tutorials, is what builds the authority that produces paid work. The closed-platform alternatives in 2026 have become more aggressive about controlling the customer relationship, which makes the WordPress case for ownership and contribution louder than it was in 2011, not quieter.

What 2026 makes possible

The plugin landscape has consolidated. The hosting market has matured. The decision tree for “should you use WordPress” has more good answers and more honest ones than it did then. The specific economics: what an hour costs, what a maintenance retainer looks like, have moved with the market. The principle behind them is intact. For the current numbers, the pricing pages on this site are the right reference.

Slide deck from WordCamp Detroit 2011, archived for reference. Companion archive: the WordCamp Toronto edition of the same talk.