Selling WordPress Plugins Direct After Envato’s Fee Cut
On 1 July 2026, Envato moved every ThemeForest and CodeCanyon author onto a flat 50% author fee. Before that, an established exclusive author could keep as much as 87.5% of an item’s price — so for some authors this is roughly a 43% cut to income on the exact same sales. In the same change, Envato abolished the exclusivity requirement: authors are now free to sell their items elsewhere too.
Read those two together. The thing that used to stop an author from selling WordPress plugins direct is gone, on the same day their reason to want to is the strongest it’s been in years.
So: what does selling WordPress plugins direct actually take?
The honest list, no shortcuts skipped
- A store. WooCommerce on your own WordPress site is the obvious choice if you’re already a WordPress plugin or theme author — you already know the platform.
- Payments and tax. Stripe or PayPal through WooCommerce handles payments; tax handling (VAT, sales tax by region) is a real piece of work you’ll need to solve once, not per sale.
- Licence issuance and activation. A licence key per sale, checked against the site it’s activated on, so you can tell a legitimate customer from a shared download link.
- An update server. Paying customers expect to keep getting updates the way they did on the marketplace — that means your plugin needs to phone home somewhere that isn’t Envato anymore.
- Renewals. If you want recurring revenue instead of one-time sales, you need subscription billing tied to licence state, so a lapsed renewal actually stops delivering updates.
That’s normally five separate integration jobs. It doesn’t have to be.
What DMSI DDLS gives you on day one
DMSI DDLS (Digital Downloads, Licensing & Subscriptions) is a new free WordPress plugin that turns a WooCommerce store into a software business. It runs on top of WooCommerce, so your store, your payments and your tax stay exactly where they already are — and it adds the part WooCommerce has no opinion about:
- A licence key on every sale, generated automatically the moment the order completes and checked against the sites it’s activated on — so you can tell a paying customer from a shared download link.
- Signed download links, instead of a zip file anyone can pass around.
- Renewals tied to licence state — a renewal extends the licence, a cancellation revokes access. Recurring revenue that actually enforces itself.
- A self-service customer portal on your own site, where buyers see their licences, download their software and manage their subscriptions without emailing you first.
Updates come from a companion product, the DMSI Update Server, which your plugin or theme checks against. Wire it in once and your customers get new versions in their own WordPress admin — exactly the experience they had on the marketplace, now coming from you.
DMSI DDLS core is live on WordPress.org and free to install. No revenue share, no per-sale fee, no transaction cut. Try DMSI DDLS free →
One thing to be straight about
The marketplace wasn’t only handling your checkout. It was doing your discovery. People come to CodeCanyon and ThemeForest to browse, not to search for your name specifically, and a direct store — however well built — does not replace that. No licensing plugin will, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
So the smart move isn’t “leave Envato”. It’s to keep the listing for discovery and build the direct channel for the relationship — for the customers who already know you, for the renewals a marketplace fee eats twice, and as leverage the next time the terms change. The July change simply made that second channel worth far more than it was in June.
Where to start
Your store already exists. The licensing, the downloads, the renewals and the customer portal arrive with DMSI DDLS, free, and the update path plugs in when you’re ready for it. If you’re weighing this decision, the fee change is a fact you can check yourself on Envato’s own Author Hub — what you do with it is yours to decide.
Get started with DMSI DDLS → or see how it compares to other free licence managers.
