Danny van Kooten Turned Free WordPress Plugins into a Paid Software Business

Linking the Distribution of Free Plugins to Paid Product Sales

In December 2022, Danny van Kooten revealed that the monthly revenue of MC4WP, which he had built, was 36,000 euros excluding VAT. He added that the WordPress plugin he made in 2013 had covered his living expenses ever since. A feature that helps websites collect email signups had grown over about nine years into a software business that sells.

Demand Found in Repeated Client Work

He is from the Netherlands and in 2010, at eighteen, began building client websites with WordPress. As he repeatedly implemented Mailchimp signup features on client sites, he came to need a shared plugin so he would not do the same work many times over. A request that came up repeatedly during client development became the starting point of the product.

The general-purpose plugin he built earlier, Newsletter Sign-Up, reached about 150,000 cumulative downloads around 2013. He noticed that many of its users used Mailchimp, so he developed MC4WP, specialized for Mailchimp. Narrowing the integration target made it possible to keep the setup and code simple and to offer features for that service in more depth. The approach of automatically loading the subscriber list and settings once an API key is entered also came from that choice.

The place where he actually started developing was a hospital room in Vietnam. In 2013, during a trip, he had surgery for acute appendicitis, and he wrote code on a laptop a friend brought him; a few days later he uploaded the first version to the WordPress plugin directory. The early feature only went as far as adding a newsletter signup checkbox to registration and comment forms, but it was enough to start receiving user feedback. After that he improved features and fixed bugs every week.

After finishing the paid extension, he built a sales page with Easy Digital Downloads and put an upgrade link inside the free version. The morning after he shipped the update, several payments came in, and he saw the possibility of cutting back on client work and focusing on plugin development.

MC4WP passed 100,000 downloads in December 2013, before six months had passed since launch. By the end of 2014, free-version downloads had grown past 830,000 and paying customers past 5,000. His recollection that paying customers numbered in the hundreds early that year shows that free distribution and paid sales grew together from the start.

The Line Between the Free and Paid Versions

The free version of MC4WP covers basic work: building email signup forms and connecting signup to existing contact, comment, and checkout forms. The paid version widens the scope with multiple signup forms, visual design editing, subscriber sync, and detailed records and statistics. In particular, sending WooCommerce order information to Mailchimp lets you see what a subscriber bought and how much revenue an email campaign led to. It is a structure that gives customers who want to handle more complex marketing work a reason to upgrade.

He also placed sales prompts on the screens where users would need the relevant feature, such as introducing the paid visual editor right where they edit the design of a signup form. At the same time, he put his own newsletter signup field in the free version to create a channel to reach users directly, and he recalled that hundreds of email addresses began to collect each day. He made use of both the distribution power of the plugin directory and his own contact list.

As of September 2026, the paid version of MC4WP is sold at 59 dollars a year for one site, 99 dollars for up to five sites, and 249 dollars for up to twenty-five sites. All three plans include the paid features and priority support, and the main difference is the number of sites allowed. It is a structure that serves both a customer running a single site and a maker managing several client sites with the same product, and continues sales through annual renewals.

Running a Solo Product as a Small Company

Early growth brought the burden of customer support. He said he grew exhausted answering inquiries more than five hours a day, and only after finding someone to help did he recover his drive and energy. Later he judged that delaying hiring had cost him at least a year of real progress.

In June 2015 he gave the business, which had been run under his personal name, the company name ibericode. He had already been working every day with two people for several months, and he needed a name that fit an organization splitting up the growing work. It was the process of a one-person business started in 2010 turning into a small company that shared product development and support.

According to the official team page, van Kooten handles the code, the website, the documentation, and marketing. Harish Chouhan and Arne Lap handle customer support and installation and integration problems, and Inge Janssen helps with administration and operations. Van Kooten explains that he has worked remotely with the two support colleagues for more than ten years. It is a form in which support and operations are shared to keep a single developer's product running for the long term.

When he disclosed the revenue in 2022, he said the time he himself spent on MC4WP was about four hours a week. Two freelancers handled the rest of the work, and he explained that he paid each about 1,000 euros a month. The condition that made the founder's short working hours possible included the colleagues' continuous customer support.

In the same post he said he was open to a sale offer in the range of about 1.6 million euros. Later, in a comment on WP Tavern, he explained that his motivation for the product had declined and that someone with fresh drive and marketing ability could develop its potential further. He also revealed his view that simply keeping a product on minimal maintenance for a long time makes it hard to give users enough value. The 1.6 million euros was the asking price he proposed at the time.

Koko Analytics: Solving the Upkeep Cost of a Free Product

The experience he built up in the website analytics field led to a separate product. In 2018 van Kooten developed Fathom Analytics with Paul Jarvis, but in March 2019 he announced he was stepping back from the project. His reason was that it was hard to cut down the time he spent at the computer while handling childcare, running MC4WP, and carrying responsibility for Fathom all together.

In November of the same year he introduced Koko Analytics, a visit-statistics plugin made specifically for WordPress. It shows the number of visitors, page views, popular content, and referrers, and it was designed so the statistics data is processed on the website's own server. Users could collect statistics by installing and activating the plugin rather than setting up a separate analytics server. Excluding bounce rate and time on page from tracking at launch was also a choice to keep the implementation and usage simple.

This distribution model also connected to the developer's operating burden. Van Kooten cited as an advantage that building Koko on top of WordPress removed the need to run core server infrastructure for other people himself. The collection and storage of visit statistics happen on each customer's site, and the developer focuses on developing and supporting the plugin.

At first he thought of Koko as a gift to the internet and distributed it for free, and he turned down suggestions to accept donations. But while users grew, the cost of paying support staff kept accumulating. He later began accepting donations through OpenCollective, but the annual donation budget he disclosed in 2023 was about 80 dollars, enough to cover the server cost of the product's introduction site. It was too little to sustain customer support as well.

Koko Analytics Pro, released on October 18, 2023, was the response to this problem. The first paid feature was custom event tracking that counts actions specified on a site, and the launch price started at 49 euros a year. He explained that sales of the paid version also go toward covering the development and support costs of the free version. The approach was to keep basic statistics free while accepting more complex needs as paid features.

He also added features that lower the switching burden for new users. In November 2024 he put a feature into the product that imports past statistics from Jetpack Stats. By letting people move the page-view history they had already accumulated, it became easier even for those who had used another analytics tool for a long time to adopt Koko.

As of September 2026, Koko Analytics Pro offers statistics by country, device and browser analysis, email reports, and marketing campaign tracking. The price is 59 euros a year for one site, 99 euros for up to five sites, and 249 euros for up to twenty-five sites, and every plan includes the paid features. It amounts to applying the per-site annual license model used for MC4WP to the second major product as well.

A Case Where Free Distribution Funded Long-Term Maintenance

The active-install counts shown in the official WordPress directory as of September 2026 are more than one million for MC4WP and more than 60,000 for Koko Analytics. Both products distribute a free version widely while selling a paid extension separately. The published install scale and sales structure can be confirmed, but no separate revenue figure for Koko Analytics is given in the material reviewed.

The part worth noting in this case is that the distribution of the free product, the reason to buy the paid features, and the cost of customer support are linked to each other. MC4WP extended the customer's need from collecting subscribers to e-commerce marketing, and Koko from basic visit statistics to detailed behavior analysis. Van Kooten charges at those points of extension and, together with a few colleagues, built a business that keeps developing and supporting even the free version.