a WordCamp Buffalo 2023 talk on how contributing to the community and giving shipped, code, and expertise away for free is itself a viable path to a WordPress consulting practice. The talk traces the same thesis the speaker first argued at WordCamps Detroit and Toronto in 2011 — twelve years of evidence in the same line of work.

Where and when

Illustration supporting key points in Make a Living by Giving It away for Free
a quick visual summary to make the concept easier to understand at a glance.

Watch or read

This session was not recorded for WordPress.tv. The official WordCamp Buffalo 2023 session page (linked above) is the canonical archive of the abstract.

The premise

From the published session abstract:

“This presentation is all about how contributing to the community and offering improved value will help developers, consultants, designers and everyone else in the WordPress eco-system make money by giving away WordPress for free.”

The core argument (reconstructed)

Reconstructed analysis. The published abstract is the primary source. The section below presents the talk’s likely argument in a thesis → supporting ideas → counterpressure structure, as a reading framework rather than a transcript.

Thesis

Contributing to the WordPress community and offering improved value — through shipped, documentation, talks, and direct help — is itself the path to making money in the WordPress economy. The free work is the positioning, not a tax on the paid work.

Supporting ideas

  • Trust over scale. a small consultancy doesn’t need millions of users; it needs a hundred who trust it deeply. Free, supported, documented work earns trust in a way paid acquisition rarely matches.
  • Community as a category, not a channel. Showing up in WordPress forums, slack groups, and conferences isn’t marketing — it repositions the consultant into a category of practitioner that paid marketing cannot reach.
  • Specific over general. Free generic content is noise; a specific plugin that solves one narrow gnarly problem for the few people who have it is signal. Give the specific thing away.
  • Compounding over campaigns. a campaign runs for a quarter; a free plugin that’s still working a decade later compounds across a whole career.

Counterpressure (what would push back on this in 2023)

  • The rise of paid platforms that pull attention away from open-source community spaces.
  • The quarterly attention economy: a long-term reputation play loses to a short-term funnel in a quarterly P&L.
  • Generative aI starting to commoditise the marginal cost of how-to content — “useful” got cheap.
  • Platform consolidation pressure: when one company controls more of the WordPress economy, community participation feels less independent.

Three-year reflection (2026)

Retrospective interpretation, not direct recall.

What aged well. The trust-over-scale framing held up. The community-as-category claim held up. The specific-over-general principle has only sharpened — aI has made generic how-to content essentially free, which raised the value of dated, named, supported, specific work proportionally.

What assumptions shifted. The 2023 talk assumed that “useful” content was still the bottleneck for visibility. By 2026 that’s no longer the right framing — useful content is everywhere; trustworthy content is the actual scarce resource. The talk’s underlying logic still works, but the way to operationalise it has moved from “publish more useful work” toward “publish work that’s clearly accountable to a real practitioner.”

What didn’t move. The original 2011 thesis — that giving WordPress code away for free can underwrite a real consulting career — is at this point twelve years past first delivery and three years past this Buffalo revisit. The pattern keeps holding: the people who give the most away in this ecosystem keep being the same people running healthy independent practices.

Want this talk delivered for your team or conference? Get in touch — happy to bring a 2026 version with another decade of evidence in it.

Christopher Ross

Written by

Christopher Ross

I've been building WordPress sites since 2007 and on the open web since 1996. I've shipped editorial systems for the Postmedia national newspaper network and brand sites for Sherwin-Williams industrial brands, and I write about WordPress and editorial decisions from Fort Erie, Ontario.

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