April 2026 Newsletter

Monthly journals are updated weekly, as each InfluenceWP Weekly newsletter drops.

Partner Spotlight

WP Security Ninja

WordPress sites face attacks every day, yet many site owners still feel stuck when security tools get too technical. That gap is where WP Security Ninja has built its name. It presents WordPress security in a way that feels usable, practical, and far less overwhelming for normal site owners, agencies, and busy professionals.

Visit WP Security Ninja on InfluenceWP to learn more about the brand and the plugin, watch the first look video, read video companion posts, and get an exclusive deal.

InfluenceWP Updates

Partnerships

New and Deepended Partnerships 👇

• EventKoi—Fast, Modern Events Plugin Built for Today’s WordPress. 20% off
• The wpWax team has deepened their partnership with InfluenceWP for their Directorist solution—the most complete WordPress directory plugin. Directorist is an AI-powered, all-in-one solution to build any type of directory or classified website with ease.
• Strakture—A WordPress FSE (Full Site Editing) toolkit that combines a pattern library, AI-powered pattern generation, and a complete block theme with full WooCommerce integration that lets you launch beautiful, high-performance websites in record time. 20% off
• Image Configurator for Gravity Forms—Real-Time Image Previews While Customizing Products in Gravity Forms. 20% off
• WooReports—Advanced WooCommerce Reporting Plugin (Get 40% Off)
• Conditional Payments for WooCommerce—Hide WooCommerce Payment Gateways Based on Custom Rules (Get 40% Off)
• OrderDesk—Create WooCommerce Orders in Seconds (Get 40% Off)

First Look Videos

These videos are our first look at products from our partners. We will experience them for the first time, just as a new customer would.

• Directorist—an AI-powered, all-in-one solution to build any type of directory or classified website with ease.

FREE Giveaways 🎉

InfluenceWP ran viral giveaways for the following partners. Want to do the same? Great! Please submit your giveaway using our simple form, and we’ll take care of the rest.

• Termageddon (IWP Deal) protects websites from over 120 privacy laws, rules, and regulations. Plus, the policies auto-update as laws change or new laws go into effect, making it a fantastic set-it-and-forget-it option for web designers and agencies with multiple clients. Now’s your chance to protect two websites with the most comprehensive website policies and cookie consent solution on the market.
• LinkCentral (IWP Deal) is the ultimate URL shortener and link analytics plugin. Create custom short links, insert and sync them anywhere, track and analyze clicks, and customize them for specific needs.

Updates From Our Partners

• SEOPress v9.7 (IWP Deal) is a major update that brings their first React-powered settings screens—designed to deliver a smoother, faster, and more intuitive user experience, even better URL redirects, author schema improvements, two new endpoints (automatic schemas and SEO alerts), and a ton more improvements and fixes.
• WP Umbrella v2.22.1 (IWP Deal) brings improved broken link checker crawling, backup scan performance for large sites, redirect router performance, and a support page redesign with data counts, as well as some fixes.
• Fluent Forms v6.2 (IWP Deal) brings improvements to the internal framework for better performance and PHP 8.4 support, Stripe payment confirmation security, data export security, database query performance for reports, and overall plugin security and stability, as well as a filter hook for conversational form extra inputs.
• Coupon Affiliates for WooCommerce v7.6 (IWP Deal) brings a new SMS Notifications feature, a “Send Notification Email” checkbox to the Add New Affiliate and Add New Coupon admin forms, and performance improvements, as well as numerous fixes and improved security.
• uiXpress v1.2.21 (IWP Deal) is a small but meaningful maintenance release focused on stability, polish, and a handy new settings option, bringing smarter hover submenus, dashboard tab reordering, and dark mode polish, as well as numerous bug fixes. For those not familiar with this plugin, it completely modernizes the WordPress dashboard.
• Independent Analytics v2.14.7 (IWP Deal) adds URL filters to the User Journeys report, integration with the Complianz plugin, form validation to Campaign Builder, WordPress 7.0 compatibility, and numerous other enhancements and fixes.
• Infinite Uploads v3.2 (IWP Deal) is a massive update, bringing full folder management, improved filtering, sorting, and enhanced search to the WordPress Media Library—unlimited nested folders. drag-and-drop files, color coding of folders, folder support in the media picker for popular page builders, and more.
• ShutterPress v1.8 (IWP Deal) brings new features such as a lightbox plugin and icon filter hooks for extending LightGallery integrations, gallery container and lightbox item data attribute filters for custom integrations, “like” icons now available directly in the lightbox with synced state between gallery and lightbox views, image counts on the gallery admin page, and significantly improved performance for large galleries. ShutterPress is a WordPress gallery plugin built for photographers.
• NeetoRecord (IWP Deal) recordings now support comments — you, your team members, and viewers can share feedback, ask questions, or start a conversation right on the recording, without needing email or chat. You can also now request a screen recording from anyone — no account or installation required on their end. Share a link, and the recipient records their screen in their browser and sends it directly to you. NeetoRecord is my go-to solution for videos as a replacement for Loom.
• FluentSupport v2.1 (IWP Deal) brings Agent Groups to organize support teams and enable smart ticket distribution, an Agent Signature option for support agents, Agent-Initiated Tickets (agents can create tickets on behalf of customers), a new email template for Agent-Initiated Tickets, file upload integration with Cloudflare R2 and Amazon S3 (Pro), and more, including performance optimizations and numerous fixes.
• WP Umbrella v2.22.3 (IWP Deal) brings request trace breadcrumbs for update diagnostics and support for SiteGround cache as well as improvements to the update state machine to prevent race conditions during rollbacks. WP Umbrella is what I use within my agency to manage all sites under management.
• Perfmatters v2.6.1 (IWP Deal) brings adjustments to the code snippets error handler initialization logic to avoid unnecessary handling if no relevant code snippets are active, additional plugin UI style adjustments for WordPress 7, and further refinements, as well as numerous fixes. This plugin goes on every website under my management.
• Virfice v1.2.2 (IWP Deal) brings the option to add contacts manually, an individual contact overview with editable fields, custom fields for contacts, a contact import system with proper data mapping, and the ability to export contacts as a CSV file, as well as other improvements and fixes. Virfice is a self-hosted email marketing solution for WordPress.
• Coupon Affiliates for WooCommerce v7.7 (IWP Deal) is a big update that brings a completely rebuilt Admin Reports & Analytics page with a more modern design, admin reports that now include additional statistics such as a trends chart, traffic sources, top performers, activity log events, and more, a PDF download option for the admin reports that generates a PDF version of the report, and a new affiliate group filter to the admin reports to only include statistics for affiliates in a specific group, along with numerous improvements, tweaks, and fixes.
• Simply Static has some new and important integrations. There’s a dedicated Markdown integration that you can enable, and it will add an additional task between fetching pages and pushing your files to your configured deployment target. A new command center integration, which is a new admin bar widget, is much more powerful than the original admin bar integration, allowing you to perform all your day-to-day tasks from Simply Static in a clean and minimalistic way. Last but not least is their official Search & Filter Pro integration, tapping into one of the most powerful WordPress plugins to add faceted search for literally any kind of content you can imagine.
• FluentAffiliate v1.4 (IWP Deal) brings SliceWP migration, commission on WooCommerce subscription renewal, subscription renewal commission rates per product/category, CSV export for affiliates, referrals, and visits, social media share for affiliates in the Affiliate Portal, QR code settings for the Affiliate Portal, and more, as well as numerous fixes.
• Activity Log Pro v1.0.5 (IWP Deal) brings new security alerts (receive email notifications for important security, content, and core/plugin events, configure alert cooldown periods, set multiple recipients, and choose which categories to monitor), an option to exclude media attachments deleted from excluded post types, a log retention period and next scheduled auto-purge date to the activity log summary stats box, and stat cards are now pre-filtered—click any card to jump directly to the Activity Logs screen with that event type pre-filtered.
• WP Umbrella v2.22.3 (IWP Deal) brings Broken Link & Image Scanning (daily scans detect all types of broken links and images across your sites) and Redirection Management (fix broken URLs with redirect rules directly from your dashboard), and the data for uptime and performance monitoring is now more accurate. WP Umbrella is what I use within my agency to manage all sites under management.
• Bit Flows v1.18.0 (IWP Deal) brings new features like Human in the Loop (pause a flow and wait for manual approval via email), MCP Client node (connect any MCP-compatible server directly inside a flow), and Editable Node Labels (rename action or trigger nodes inline in the builder), as well as numerous new actions, triggers, and fixes. In case you didn’t know, Bit Flows is an advanced workflow automation alternative to Zapier in WordPress.
• Fluent Forms v6.2.1 (IWP Deal) brings hardened form-scoped permissions, filter hooks for honeypot, Akismet, and CAPTCHA spam/failed messages, and more improvements as well as numerous fixes. Fluent Forms is the forms solution I use across my businesses.
• Simple Points and Rewards for WooCommerce v1.11 (IWP Deal) brings guest customer points tracking, a level points requirement option, custom level multipliers per way to earn, and numerous improvements to performance and design, as well as general fixes.
• WP Social Ninja v4.2 (IWP Deal) brings the ability to collect and display FluentCart product reviews, replace WooCommerce’s default review field and collect custom reviews with native forms, and enjoy better performance with more security.
• Fluent Support v2.1.2 (IWP Deal) brings a more simplified image upload flow, attachments for ticket emails (including Agent-created tickets and Agent-initiated tickets), an improved dark mode UI, and a handful of fixes.
• Hoverify v4.7.2 (IWP Deal) brings an overhaul to the Screenshot Editor, including drawable annotations, an undo/redo system, and a bunch of quality-of-life shortcuts. There are also some excellent additions to the Color Eyedropper, Responsive, and Inspector features, as well as other improvements and bug fixes. Hoverify supercharges web development workflows with an all-in-one browser extension that helps you inspect, edit, test, debug, and optimize websites faster.
• Strakture v1.2 (IWP Deal) brings the ability to select a block in the editor and use Customize with AI to rewrite copy, replace images, and refine colors directly in place, and the Customize with AI modal now includes site-aware quick prompts.
• Fluent Forms v6.2.2 (IWP Deal) adds subscription field support for payment calculations and includes numerous improvements and fixes that are too many to list here. Fluent Forms is the forms solution I use across my businesses.
• NeetoRecord (IWP Deal) now has the ability to expand your camera to full screen while recording in screen + camera mode and switch back at any time. This is great for focusing on yourself instead of the screen—walking through an idea, reacting to something, or any moment when your face should be front and center. NeetoRecord replaced Loom for me a long time ago.
• Meta Box v5.12 (IWP Deal) brings smarter fields and a smoother workflow along with a new link field: native WP popup (code/Builder), the builder upgraded to React 18 for better performance, and the ability to set time format directly within Datetime.
• uiXpress v1.2.22 (IWP Deal) brings two long-requested controls—per-tab visibility and a post type selector that drives Recent Content, Scheduled Content, and Recent Comments—so you can tailor the dashboard to exactly what matters for your site. The modern plugin manager also gets a meaningful upgrade: Uploading a ZIP for an already-installed plugin now triggers a confirmation step that surfaces the plugin’s version and requirements before anything is replaced, and active plugins correctly stay active after a successful swap. White-label renaming now carries through to the plugin list and detail view as well. If you’re not familiar, uiXPress transforms your WordPress admin with a clean, professional interface that reduces cognitive load and helps you work faster with less friction.

Other WordPressers Not to Be Overlooked

• Mike McAlister (X) announced an intuitive and unobtrusive way to bring responsive controls to your typography, margin, padding, and alignment styles within the WordPress block editor when using OllieWP. I’m using OllieWP on more and more sites, and I highly recommend giving it a try. ThemeSwitcher Pro (IWP Deal) makes it easy to switch from a classic theme over to a block-based theme like Ollie.
• Two Factor v0.16 (Changelog) brings new features such as a dedicated settings page for plugin configuration in the WordPress dashboard, support links filter so consumers can customize contextual recovery/help links, and a refreshed backup codes UI styling/behavior, as well as a breaking change with the removal of legacy FIDO U2F provider support and numerous developer updates and bug fixes. I use this powerful (and free) plugin on every website under my management.
• Per Soderlind (X) announced the free Virtual Media Folders—Migrate plugin (GitHub), which allows you to import folders and file assignments from other media folder plugins like FileBird, Enhanced Media Library, Real Media Library, HappyFiles, and more.
• Mahdi Khaksar (X) announced the free Conditional Payment Gateways for WooCommerce plugin (Changelog) that allows you to hide certain payment gateways based on criteria like cart totals, shipping destination, coupons applied, and more.
• ACF Pro v6.8 (Announcement Post) brings three powerful features: WordPress Abilities API integration, automatic structured data, and new WP-CLI commands for managing ACF JSON—all working together to make your ACF content discoverable, interoperable, and ready for the next generation of AI tools and search experiences, with improved developer workflows to match.
• Auto-Close v3.1.0 (Changelog) brings taxonomy-based exclusions, automatic comment reopening when you update a post, and email notifications after each scheduled run. This free plugin allows you to close comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks automatically in WordPress.
• Simple CAPTCHA Alternative with Cloudflare Turnstile v1.38 (Changelog) brings a “Refresh Timeout” option to the advanced settings, and the Cloudflare health check (used by failover mode) is now cached for 2 minutes to prevent repeated HTTP requests, as well as numerous fixes, dev notes, and security enhancements. This plugin goes on every website under my management.
• FluentCart v1.3.17 (Release Post) brings a visual PDF invoice customizer, saved filter views, e-invoice support (ZUGFeRD / Factur-X), a fees API, shipping country include/exclude, filterable frontend asset loading, plus a solid round of fixes covering stock handling after test order deletion, bulk product duplication, downloadable file editing, Turnstile verification, decimal support in shipping fees, Paddle recovery links, checkout summary block consolidation, and pagination sync.
• Query Monitor 4 (Changelog) brings a new timeline view and switches from rendering its panels server-side in PHP to efficiently rendering them client-side in Preact, providing several performance benefits.
• Dr. Jaime Alnassim (X) announced his new WP WAF plugin to deploy battle-tested Cloudflare WAF rules for WordPress, manage DNS, monitor analytics, purge cache, block IPs, and route email. As a heavy Cloudflare user myself, I find this plugin to be a super interesting product. It’s completely free if you’re willing to manually apply updates yourself, but the Pro version has extremely generous pricing.
• Danny van Kooten (X) announced Koko Analytics version v2.3 (Changelog), which brings a handful of user-facing improvements to the dashboard and several under-the-hood changes to improve database performance and reliability. If you’re looking for privacy-friendly statistics for WordPress, give this one a look.
• Kevin Batdorf (X) released Code Block Pro v1.28 (Changelog), bringing modernized tooling: swapping ESLint/Prettier to Biome and Cypress/wp-env to Playwright + WP Playground. This is the plugin I use on my sites where I need to display code for documentation and sharing purposes.
• Kazuto Takeshita (X) created Optrion (GitHub), a WordPress plugin that safely cleans up the bloat in wp_options by identifying the source of access + quarantining. I took this plugin for a spin. On the first screen, it gave me the overall autoload payload, and I could quickly determine whether it fell within an acceptable range. While the overall payload was acceptable, I investigated further. Some of the biggest autoload offenders happened to be for plugins that no longer exist on the site, meaning they didn’t thoroughly clean up after themselves. So, I checked the boxes next to each of them, clicked delete, and they were gone. We not only get to see the size of each autoload, but we also get to see the last time there was activity on it and which solution invoked it, which helps in determining which autoloads can likely to go away. Great plugin, and it does more than what I’ve outlined here!
• Marcin Dudek (X) mentioned his Make WordPress Fast Again project, which is really cool on several levels. One thing you can do is check what kind of performance impact you can expect from a particular plugin and even compare that plugin to its competition regarding performance. If you’re a WordPress plugin creator, you might want to take a peek to see if benchmarks are available for your plugin(s).
• Utsav Ladani (X) shared that one of his friends created Gutenberg Blocks Inspector (GitHub), a Chrome extension that helps users view and analyze the various blocks in the Gutenberg editor. This tool is designed for WordPress developers and content creators who want to better understand how blocks are structured and what kind of blocks are in use. This share was in response to Brian Coords’ (X) mentioning of his WooCommerce Block Visualizer tool (GitHub) that overlays visual outlines and class name labels on WooCommerce block components, making it easy to identify and target the right CSS selectors when styling Woo blocks.
• Link Warnings v1.2 (Changelog) by WebberZone now allows you to make links always act as external links, even if they are automatically detected, and you can customize the wzlw-no-icon and wzlw-no-icon-wrapper class names, along with a security fix and several bug fixes. Link Warnings is a free plugin that adds visual indicators, modal confirmations, or redirect screens — helping you align with accessibility best practices without rewriting your content.
• Christopher Smith (X) announced that WP System Report 1.2 (GitHub) is out, allowing your WordPress site to talk to AI agents directly. Agents can pull diagnostics, read error logs, and get context-aware recommendations and guide you with fixes.
• FluentCart 1.3.19 (Release Post) is a big update for stores selling physical products, with packaging support for physical products (create reusable package profiles (box, envelope, and soft package) with length, width, height, unit, and empty weight and assign them per variation, and the data goes straight into the order, which is what rate calculators need to give you proper quotes) and a redesigned variation editor, a price input field fix, as well as numerous improvements under the hood.
• Denis Franchi (X) shared his story for why he built CloakScan. It compares how a site looks to a real visitor vs. Googlebot in real time and was built out of necessity during the worst night of the story he shared.
• Sybre Waaijer (X) dropped an important post about 4 bugs he found in the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, with the overall alert being that WooCommerce store owners running this plugin could have lost potential revenue. Sybre mentioned Automattic’s CEO (Matt Mullenweg) as part of a call for leadership to look into the bugs, proper communication, etc., and the good news is it did get proper attention with actions quickly taken. Whether or not you agree with Sybre’s views or approach, the sheer amount of time he took to surface and communicate his findings should be applauded.
• Robby McCullogh (X) shared that Sybre’s findings compelled one of their team members (Simon Prosser) at Beaver Builder to create the WCS Manual Renewal Fix plugin (GitHub), which finds and fixes affected subscriptions.
• MediaRon (X) shared updates for his free Pattern Wrangler plugin (Changelog), including updating the DataView component to the latest, smarter loading, and better previews and compatibility with GeneratePress, KadenceWP, Spectra, and the Block Visibility plugin.
• Brian Coords (X) dropped a preview of WP Content Types (GitHub) to show how we should bring modern, AI-native content modeling to WordPress, in a very alpha prototype. As a CMS, this is something that should have been in WordPress core a long time ago.
• Bunty (X) introduced Media Library Manager, a plugin to help you clean up your WordPress media library. It detects duplicate media, keeps the oldest file as original, replaces references automatically, and safely removes duplicates.
• Elliot Sowersby (X) announced Simple CAPTCHA Alternative with Cloudflare Turnstile v1.39 (Changelog), which adds integrations for SureForms (X) and Sunshine Photo Cart (X). I use this plugin for every website under my management, and even if it wasn’t free, it would still be a no-brainer.

WordPress Tidbits

• WordPress Studio v1.7.8 (GitHub) brings a number of improvements and fixes for the CLI, SSL, dark mode, overall UI, and more. I’m using WordPress Studio for local WordPress development, and if you happen to be running it on Windows, be sure to speed up WordPress Studio (File > Help > “How do I speed up…”) by adjusting Microsoft Defender.
• WordPress Playground (X) now has an official MCP server via the new @wp-playground/mcp package. One command connects Claude Code or Gemini CLI to a local Playground instance for file access, PHP execution, and site management.
• The WordPress block editor finally gets responsive controls, kind of.
• I was on the WP-Tonic podcast talking about WordPress plugins in the world of AI.
• WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule—As you’re probably aware, the release of WordPress 7.0 was delayed, and it took awhile to find out when the new version could be expected. The good news is we now have a new release date: May 20th, 2026. Read the full post.

EmDash

EmDash announced itself as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress.

I stay out of the “business” side of WordPress. EmDash, or at least the discussion of it falls into that category. Instead, I concentrate on areas where I can potentially make a positive impact.

So, when I was asked on the WP-Tonic podcast about my thoughts on EmDash, I really didn’t have any, other than to draw attention to a wonderful article I read from Brian Coords (X) right before the show, by mere coincidence. As I told Brian, “It’s refreshing to read content where folks really try to see both sides and not blanket-bash WordPress or emDash, in this case.”

Honestly, I have zero desire to look deeper into EmDash. I bought a .com domain from Cloudflare (my recommended registrar, by the way) related to EmDash as an investment play. I own Cloudflare stock. That’s it.

The WordPress inner circle, which can influence its direction, appears to be paying attention to EmDash, and that is what really matters. Let’s take the good from the technical side of EmDash and learn from it. As a community, they can’t touch WordPress.

AI & Product Support

AI recently helped me get around a terrible support experience. Long story short, a theme made a change that was breaking Select2 in certain cases.

I submitted a support ticket to the theme vendor. Two weeks later, I finally received a response, along with a non-working code snippet.

The theme company blamed a plugin. The plugin company blamed the theme. You know the dance.

What I initially observed with a specific plugin was merely a small part of a larger problem. The issue was more widespread and impacting other areas.

After a follow-up with theme support, I was then ghosted for a month.

It’s not like I was asking for a new feature that only I wanted. This was a bug that was impacting a lot of people using this theme.

So, I set up a test site with the theme and the plugin that initially showed me the signs of the issue, connected to the site with Cursor, and told it the issue.

As a non-dev, I had the solution in two minutes. Two minutes!

Here’s the thing. As a vendor, if people are paying you for software that includes both support and updates, AI can help you reduce support tickets, especially if your documentation is on point. All good there.

However, if you’re a vendor who provides free updates while trying to monetize off of support only, you might want to think about things differently.

Self-support is only going to get easier for non-developers, and those support contracts/agreements/subscriptions/etc. will start to fall off over time.

Additionally, this trend extends beyond support issues.

I recently created an add-on for a plugin using AI, rather than submitting and waiting for a feature request that would likely never come. Think about that. Feature requests help shape products, but what happens if they dry up too?

Anywho, some things to think about.

The WordPress Plugin Repository Needs Some Love

I recorded this video to highlight the challenges faced by users and developers who use and rely on the WordPress plugin repository, highlighting issues with plugin discovery and the presence of stale plugins.

The video is inspired by my work at InfluenceWP, where I want to understand the challenges WordPress product creators face and any their potential users/customers may face too.

I compare the WordPress repository to other platforms, such as the WooCommerce Marketplace, and suggest a potential paid initiative to enhance the repository’s functionality and improve user experience, among other things like speeding up WordPress features, preventing core update delays, and more.

WordPress vs. Alternative

You have a plugin that is and will always be free, with no premium upgrade path. Just free. Knowing what you know about the repo (good or bad), do you publish this free plugin there? Check out the poll and conversation.

WordPress vs. Alternative – Continued.

The results are in from a poll I ran on X. The poll asked whether, as a developer with an upcoming free plugin release, you would publish in the WordPress plugin repository.

There was a fairly decent sample size from the poll (40 votes). Despite the conversation highlighting some negative aspects of the plugin repository, developers still seem to prefer it as the option for getting their plugins discovered.

I’ll give it a shot when I decide to release the plugin I’ve been working on, if for no other reason than to experience the process and understand what developers go through. I’ve got a taste of this with the plugin we created at ChangelogWP, but this would be my first time being responsible for everything end-to-end.

WordPress Product Creators – Diversify

Start a service where you review AI-generated code for those who are pumping out plugins (as non-devs) and want to do things the right way before shipping. Help create better code for the web, make more connections, earn more money, and stay in the game.

If you’re a product creator stressing about your “small” plugins beginning to be rendered obsolete with AI or you’re simply looking for additional revenue streams to stay afloat, take off your coding hat for a bit and start this service.

Also, while I value my time as much as the next person, don’t default to charging an exorbitant fee for this service before you know the code you’re reviewing. Of course, if someone is wanting to review a commercial plugin, that’s one thing, but some may just be creating a free plugin to help the community.

Put your business hat on and think of the long term. benefits over short-term gains.

WordPress Product Creators – Diversify – Continued.

I wrote about this topic last week, stating how product creators should diversify by offering a service to review plugins created with AI.

Marcin Dudek understood the assignment and is now offering a WordPress Plugin Code Review service. He also provides a free checklist if you want to try to find and resolve issues on your own.

While I’m not one to tell someone how much they should charge for anything, I think there’s still a lost opportunity here. The cost of having AI-coded plugins fully reviewed should be priced to get people in the door.

My entrepreneurial mind wants developers offering this service to think long-term and see opportunity. You’re not only helping people ship better code, which benefits many and pushes WordPress forward, but you’re also building new relationships.

Who knows if the person whose code you’re reviewing won’t turn to you and ask, “Hey, why don’t you just build this plugin for me and get me on some sort of maintenance going forward?”

After working with you, there’s also a chance they come to you. for future projects. Think long-term over short-term transactions.

If you price the AI code review service at a level that you feel reflects the value you provide, that mindset may not be the best approach. More on that in a bit.

Furthermore, while charging a one-time fee (again, keep the price lower than you normally would) is a good option, there needs to be an ongoing offering too. After all, what someone reviews the first time around will not be the same code down the road.

So, if it were me, I’d have a low barrier of entry for the one-time fee and then a subscription option that can be considered a form of maintenance. To qualify for the subscription, the customer must first complete a one-time full code review, and then their subscription is tied to that same plugin.

Let’s return to the topic of pricing. Jake Goldman, the founder of 10up, wrote an article on The Repository—Better, Faster, and Yes, Cheaper – Or Be Left Behind, and I recommend that anyone offering products or services in the WordPress space give it a read.

Being involved with InfluenceWP puts me in a unique position. I commit to helping WordPress product creators succeed. I’m also a WordPress agency owner and therefore a customer of many WordPress-based solutions.

My point here is that when I write this newsletter, record a video, or blog, I approach it from many different angles and with zero agendas. I express my perspective as I’m seeing things in and around WordPress.

So, with that in mind, I think the days of pricing based on experience are nearing an end.

Vibe Coding is Fine. Shipping Bad Code Isn’t.

James Welbes used Marcin’s code review service and let folks know about the positive experience. He then went on to create NoMoreSlop, a resource hub for developers who build with AI and care about what they ship.

I can see this resource becoming something that really takes off, and I hope it does. It just crossed my desk this morning, but I’ll be diving in.

Pricing Based on Experience Could Be Hurting You

When I originally posted about the idea of creating the AI code review service, someone came back with, “I’ll review your plugin for $XXX per hour because I value my time and I’ve been coding for XX years.”

That last part (XX years) is what I’m talking about as being less relevant today. Being in business for XX years is a nice-to-have signal, but personally, I’m not hiring a developer just because they’ve been coding for a long time.

It’s cringeworthy when people use the length of time they’ve been doing something to win arguments, to punch down, to justify pricing, etc.

When I see someone lead with “I’ve been coding for XX years,” to me, that’s a signal of insecurity. It also signals that they might be stubborn and resistant to any technologies and processes that take them out of their comfort zone.

Longevity can be one of your credentials, but it can’t be what you lead with. What’s important to me is what you’re doing NOW.