We've seen it time and time again: WordPress users doing everything in their power to stick to free plugins. We get it. Who doesn't love free? However, by automatically throwing out anything that isn't, you could actually be costing yourself more in the long run.
Wait, what? How does that make any sense? I'm losing money by not being willing to spend money? Here's how:
You could cut your development costs and expedite timelines significantly.
Let's take a plugin like LearnDash, which adds a LMS system into your site. Premium plugins, like LearnDash, are often the equivalent of a couple of hours of senior development time in terms of their licensing fees. Do you know what wouldn't be just a couple of hours of senior development time? Building a LMS system from scratch. By choosing to leverage a plugin with this kind of functionality vs. building it from scratch, you are saving a ton of money in development fees, as well as shaving down the timeline needed to implement anything like it.
Now, we're definitely not saying that the licensing fee for something complex like LearnDash would be all that is involved. If you're wanting professional installation, configuration, customization, etc., obviously there is more to it than the base plugin licensing fee. However, if you take leveraging a premium LMS plugin out of the equation completely, the licensing fee would be a tiny fraction of what it would be to build anything comparable completely custom.
You are cutting into your own efficiency & productivity.
Sure, you can manually move a WordPress database via something like PHPMyAdmin and manually sync images and plugins and similar across WordPress instances like local and live or when moving hosts. This is totally free to do but is, quite frankly, an unpleasant tedious pain. Why would you do this when you could be experiencing the magic of WP Migrate DB Pro that just eliminates all of that trouble? If you add up the time that you spend manually moving sites, especially if you're a developer or in a similar position where this is done relatively frequently, the licensing fee for WP Migrate DB Pro pays for itself in no time. You free up that time to use elsewhere in your business.
You are making things harder for yourself than they need to be.
We see so many WordPress users losing hours, sometimes even days, of their lives fighting a free plugin to try to get it to do what they want it to do instead of investing in a premium solution that does that thing out of the box. Sure, you may be avoiding a licensing fee but you are spending your time & sanity dealing with the limited capabilities that free plugins often offer. This may leave you frustrated with WordPress or your site, in general, or, worse yet, may result in a subpar solution for your business that just isn't netting the results you're looking for.
Licensing fees are often a steal.
Like we said, we totally understand the appeal of sticking to free plugins. However, if you're not willing to even entertain paying for a WordPress plugin, realize that you're quite possibly paying in other ways: increased website development fees and timelines, decreased productivity, a site not living up to its true potential, your own sanity dealing with your site, etc.
In more cases than not, what a premium plugin brings to the table in value makes its licensing fee a steal of a deal. We highly encourage users not to ignore the world of possibilities that premium WordPress plugins offer.
