I think Ronald's approach is going to be more profitable in the longrun. The vast majority of WP users are never going to buy a paid plugin, at any price, but there is still a huge and growing market of people who will, if you do outstanding work and offer it at a reasonable price.

With AjaxEditComments, Ronald is offering a genuinely useful plugin - making comments better increases the number of your users who will get into the habit of writing comments - at a very good price. Since purchasing a lifetime membership last month, I have been impressed with how active the development has been, with a feature I love hopefully making it into version 4.

On the other end of the spectrum, the owner of Wpplugins has, as the owner for many years of a WPMU site selling expensive subscriptions mostly to universities and other large organizations, become accustomed to operating behind a very high pay-wall. The reasoning there was that most of the buyers were simply IT departments to whom price didn't make any difference, it wasn't coming out of their own pockets; sky-high pricing made a certain amount of sense in the WPMU world.

In addressing the wider WordPress market with Wppplugins, however, he finds himself unable to charge high subscription fees in a straightforward, clearly stated manner - very few site owners would buy a plugin if they knew, in advance, that it was going to cost them almost a thousand dollars a year (remember, the $39 price for AIOSEO is a "special offer", the actual monthly fee will be $69 per month, $828 per year!).

So, in order to maintain the high profits they have become accustomed to, they have adopted the deceptive practise of not clearly stating that, unlike other paid plugins, their price does not include any updates. It's pretty shabby but that's what you've got to do if you want to truly ream your customers.

Of course, the Wpplugins crew will no doubt turn up here, defending their pricing by saying that no-one is forcing customers to update, that they can simply buy the plugin once and keep using that version. The reality is that all plugins need occasional upgrades as security exploits are discovered and, in the case of a fast-moving arena such as SEO, features become redundant quite quickly and new considerations, such as canonical URLs emerge - just look at the release history of AIOSEO to see how regularly updates occur.

The reason why the more honest approach adopted by Ronald at AjaxEditComments and the guys at GravityForms will ultimately be more successful, despite the fact that they are charging so much less and giving so much more, is that people simply don't like the sort of shenanigans that Wpplugins are trying to pull. Their previous WPMU customers, mostly large organizations, may have been immune to high pricing, but at least they were told what they were getting into.

Now, instead, with Wpplugins, you have a situation in which customers are slowly going to realize how little they got for the money they paid and, as they find themselves locked out of important upgrades, you're going to start seeing a lot of resentment and anger expressed online. This price-gouging approach will probably earn them a lot of money in the short-term and, no doubt, it is easier to get major plugin authors to sign-up if you can dangle the carrot of hundreds of dollars per user per year in front of them, but the Internet hates con artists and you're going to see a pretty big backlash once people realize what they are up to.

That is why, quite rightly, the people behind Wpplugins are despised by the WordPress community but don't make the mistake of confusing that with a hostility against paid plugins. Charging for plugins is, of course, a complex issue but we can all agree that there is a world of difference between trying to provide customers with a good service at a fair price and trying to hustle them.

Companies such as AjaxEditComments and GravityForms are, through their honesty and hard work, making the case for paid plugins; shysters such as Wpplugins, despite all their propaganda, are destroying the market before it has even had a chance to establish itself. Advocates of paid plugins should have a long, hard think about what Wpplugins are doing.