The slide deck from a talk I gave at a WordCamp Toronto event in November 2011, walking through how a freelance WordPress developer can make a living in an ecosystem where most of the software is free. The room was full of people new to the WordPress economy, asking the same question I had been asking myself for the four years before that.
I gave the same talk three days later in Detroit, and the WordCamp Detroit slide deck carries the same argument to a different room.
The WordPress economy in 2011
Late 2011 sat inside the WordPress 3.2 to 3.3 cycle. The plugin and theme economies were maturing, but the freemium-versus-pay-once-versus-services debate was loud and unresolved. Most freelance WordPress developers were charging by the hour and underselling themselves. The talk was an argument for a different way to think about that.
Why the argument aged
Almost all of it. The business case for releasing plugins under the General Public License (GPL) and selling services around them got stronger every year after 2011, not weaker. Freelancers and small agencies who built reputation through open contribution are still the ones with the easiest sales cycle in 2026. The pattern: release plugins under the GPL, get hired for the work around them, has aged well. If you are releasing a plugin, the plugin-author check-in checklist is the thirty-minute habit that keeps that reputation intact. I took the talk back on stage fifteen years later, and Make a living giving it away, fifteen years on covers what changed. The follow-up to this deck is my 2013 WordCamp Toronto talk.
What is different in 2026
The specific economics have moved with the market. What an hour costs, what a maintenance retainer looks like, what a training engagement pays: none of those numbers from the deck are current. The principle behind them is. For current pricing, the service pages on this site are the right reference, and why my prices are public explains how I think about posting them. Every delivery engagement is fixed price. I have given eighteen talks since this one.
Slide deck from WordCamp Toronto 2011, archived for reference.
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