Twelve years ago, I posted to my personal blog an article titled Free Plugin Declaration: Contact Form 7 is Free. In that post, I praised the WordPress community and its open-source spirit, and swore that I would keep the Contact Form 7 plugin available free forever. Since then, my faith in the belief that WordPress plugins should be available for free has not wavered at all.
In the course of 12 years, the circumstances surrounding Contact Form 7 have significantly changed. Its download counter exceeded 300 million; that is roughly 50 times as large as the one in 2012. Now more than 10 million sites across the globe use the plugin.
Given its growing popularity, many third-party developers have joined to develop add-on plugins for Contact Form 7. Contact Form 7 is designed to be easy to extend with add-ons; I believe it is the open-source way. Sadly, however, it appears that for some developers, add-on plugin development is only a moneymaking tool.
Some months ago, I conducted a survey about add-on plugins for Contact Form 7 on the WordPress.org plugin directory. I looked at 37 plugins with a certain popularity (used on more than 10,000 sites) and found that 18 plugins among them had some kind of commercial options.
Selling add-on plugins is a business model destined to collapse. The core plugin can implement equivalent functionalities anytime in a much more sophisticated approach, and once the core decides to do so, the add-ons suddenly become useless. I think selling add-on plugins without informing users about such risks is dishonest.
Besides, it turns out that some of the add-on plugins engage in far more dishonest or malicious acts. They abuse the trademark of Contact Form 7 to mislead people into believing that the products they sell are endorsed by Contact Form 7.
We cannot overlook such malicious activities anymore. All options to protect users are on the table. As the first step, we will lock out add-on plugin promotions from Contact Form 7’s admin dashboard.