When starting our business to sell premium WordPress plugins we needed to decide how we want to manage the updates and licenses. We were not really satisfied with the solution available. Many integrate in WooCommerce or have a lot of dependencies, both we did not want, due to performance and security reasons. So we decided to built a stand-alone License and Update Manager.
If you need something similiar, please become a beta tester for free forever! You can use our License and Update Manager really for free forever (Obviously under a fair use principle: millions of updates would be getting expensive to run the server for. :)).
If your are interested, please reach out via our “info” mail.
What does it offer?
License Server and Update Server are two separated applications communicating via API with each other. So if you are only interested in one of them, it is possible.
License Server
- Integration to Stripe and Paddle
- APIs to receive payment information from provider
- E-Mails for subscription renewal problems and order success Mail with license and download Information
- User Portal, where buyers can manage their subscription, see licenses key and which domains use their license key.
- Data Privacy first: no personal data is stored, not even buyers e-mails. The license server only stores the IDs from the payment provider and if it needs for example the e-mail, the server requests it from the payment provider. Never stores it. What is not stored, can not be stolen. 🙂
- Branding and custom domains possible.
- Subscriptions and one time payments supported.
Update Server
- Seamlessly integrated with license server
- Checks for valid licenses
- Serves information if WordPress Plugin needs to be updated and serves the Plugin file
- WordPress Users can update the custom plugin in their Plugin area.
- Custom update Messages.
- Branding and custom domains possible.
- Update your Plugin file automatically with CI/CD
- Test environment.
Current Status
It is running for our two brands: Beautiful WP and Beautiful Cookie Banner for four years now. We are very happy with it, so we want to offer it to wider audience as we think others might benefit from it too.
First we want to offer it for free for some beta testers. As we use this solution in production for some time now, the base functionality with different brands is proofed to be working. The beta is more for adding more brands to it, as there is no self-service on-boarding process, yet.
If your are interested, please reach out via our “info” mail.
What do you need to get started?
- Account with stripe or paddle
- A way to share a link to the checkout. This can be your homepage, but any other way will work, for example social media. To see the flow in action with paddle please click here. Just click “Buy Now”. It is a live checkout, so do not buy it for real! The Link on the “Buy Now” buttons is an example what you would share.
- If you want to use the WordPress update server you need to implement this class in your WordPress Plugin: WordPress Custom Plugin Updater Class.
Thats it! You do not need any “Big Plugins” like WooCommerce installed. You would not even need a WordPress installation to start selling.
How does it actually work
The flow is slightly different for stripe and paddle. For stripe you directly link to a stripe payment link. As paddle does not offer this feature you link to a checkout page on our license server (you can use your domain). But the rest is the same.
After successful payment we get a notification from the payment provider webhook, and the license is created and a confirmation mail with license key and more info is sent to the customer.
If it is a subscription the license key will be valid until the current billing period ends. The validity will be extended with the next successful payment.
If your are interested, please reach out via our “info” mail.