The SaaSification of WordPress

In June, I argued that AI is wearing down the two things a WordPress plugin license pays for, support and updates, and that plugin companies would need a third pillar. One of my candidates was SaaS: “The plugin becomes the connector, not the product.”

Plenty of companies were already heading that way, some of them years before I wrote about it, and others have made the pivot more recently. Barn2’s Katie Keith, whose poll of plugin companies found that new sales in 2025 were flat or down for 80% of plugins, launched a hosted version of Document Library Pro in July. It works on any website, and she vibe coded it herself with AI in four weeks.

I’ve been calling this the SaaSification of WordPress. I think it comes down to three things: what customers now buy, what AI costs to run, and lock-in.

Five ways plugin companies are going SaaS

The moves I found fall into five rough patterns. Several companies do more than one.

1. A SaaS version that doesn’t need WordPress

Barn2’s hosted Document Library Pro lets you build a library once, then embed it on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow or any other site, or publish it as a standalone site. As the product page puts it, “we handle the hosting, security, updates, and backups for you.” A Shopify app followed five days later, and Katie said building the hosted version had put her in “full-on founder mode.”

weDevs got there first. It launched Dokan Cloud in January 2024, a SaaS version of its Dokan multivendor marketplace plugin, and has since renamed it FlyCommerce. It’s a fully hosted platform “with no WordPress dependency,” built by the team whose Dokan plugin has 30,000+ active installations on WordPress.org.

WPML’s maker, OnTheGoSystems, sells its engine separately. Private Translation Cloud (PTC) powers WPML’s automatic translation, and since June 2025 it’s also been a standalone product for translating software, with support for iOS, Android, React, Rails, Shopify and more. PTC says it translates over 2.5 billion words across 40+ languages every month.

2. A small plugin paired with a hosted service

WP Umbrella has worked this way from day one: a hosted dashboard where agencies manage their client sites, connected through a WordPress plugin. Brainstorm Force’s SureContact, an email marketing and CRM platform, “keeps execution in the cloud while staying deeply connected to WordPress.”

The fastest-moving example is WPVibe, from Awesome Motive’s SeedProd team. It’s a free plugin that connects your site to a hosted MCP server, so AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT can work on it. The paid tiers are sold on daily usage, from 5x the free allowance on Pro up to 100x on Scale. Syed Balkhi says it has passed 40,000 active installs, up from 20,000 in early September. (WordPress.org lists 9,000+ active installations, so the two counts clearly measure different things.)

3. Usage credits on top of the license

Elementor One, announced in January 2026, rolls Editor Pro into one subscription with a shared monthly credit pool: 25,000 credits for a single site and 350,000 on the Agency plan. Credits pay for AI actions (text, code and image generation), image optimization, email deliverability, accessibility fixes and more.

Rank Math sells Content AI as its own subscription, and it works with the free plugin too. PRO, Business and Agency customers only get “complimentary monthly usage limits to try select Content AI features.” Rank Math’s newer AI Visibility feature “skipped the credit system entirely and is billed on a per-feature-usage model,” according to its credits migration notes.

Multilingual plugins have metered usage for years. WPML plans include automatic translation credits, 90,000 on Multilingual CMS and 180,000 on Agency, then it’s pay-as-you-go or prepaid credit packs. TranslatePress bundles AI-translated words into every paid plan (50,000 words on Personal, 200,000 on Business) and sells extra 100,000-word packs for €24.

4. Web-only products from plugin companies

Yoast launched AI Brand Insights in beta on October 1, 2025, as part of its Yoast SEO AI+ plan at $358.80 a year plus VAT. The feature reports how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity describe your brand, and it’s “fully web-based, no plugin or CMS access required.” One of the biggest WordPress plugin companies is selling a product that never touches WordPress.

5. Managed hosting and done-for-you work

Paid Memberships Pro’s pricing page now splits in two. “Host Yourself” covers the free plugin and the $499/year Standard license. “Host With Us” starts with PMPro Max, at $99 a month (normally $149), with managed hosting, migration “from any platform,” PMPro-tuned AI Skills and Do It For Me requests: “Submit a request. We implement it. Used to cost $1,500 per request, it’s included with Max.” The headline over the hosted tier reads “Everything managed for you.” MemberPress also sells done-for-you builds, but as one-off projects (a coaching site is $2,799, billed once). PMPro puts that work inside a monthly subscription.

A few more I found:

None of this is brand new. WPML was charging for automatic translation by the credit in 2022, OptinMonster has been a SaaS since it launched, and Divi Cloud and VIP were already subscriptions sold alongside a lifetime license. The list of companies doing it now is much wider, though: page builders, SEO, membership and translation plugins, hosts and Automattic itself.

New plugin sales are falling

Katie followed her poll with a more detailed survey. Most respondents described their plugins as “partially replaceable,” and many of those reported sales declines of 15 to 29% or worse. In her words, “AI came up frequently in people’s comments.”

Barn2’s own numbers show the squeeze. Its 2025 plugin revenue was $1,710,312, up 0.65%, but new sales fell 17.8% and 61% of revenue came from renewals. Katie called it “the first year where we saw a significant drop in new sales.”

In the same year, WP Umbrella grew to $110k in monthly recurring revenue, up 67% year over year, with 5,196 premium users. Both companies sell to people who run WordPress sites. Barn2 mostly sells licenses, and WP Umbrella sells a hosted service.

AI is behind much of this. It’s taking over the support and updates a license used to pay for. It’s also making plugins cheap to build: when I counted in July, 17.4% of plugins added to WordPress.org in 2026 were AI-related, about 1 in 6. A plugin whose value is its feature list has less to defend every year.

AI costs money every time it runs

WordPress products were built on a simple deal. You pay once, or once a year, for code that runs on your own server, and the vendor pays nothing when you use it. AI doesn’t fit that deal. Every request to a model costs someone money, and a yearly license prices the customer who runs an AI feature ten times the same as one who runs it ten thousand times.

There’s a tension between the way WordPress typically works and the way AI works, and companies have to find different ways to incorporate it. Credits, hosted services and SaaS tiers are what they’ve landed on so far. A SaaS layer lets a company bundle AI-powered features into a single monthly or annual cost, rather than asking customers to manage their own token usage.

To be fair, a lot of the credits trend is cost pass-through. When Elementor, Rank Math, Jetpack and TranslatePress meter AI features, they’re mostly covering what the models cost them, and that pricing would exist with or without any interest in lock-in.

SaaS gives you the lock-in GPL never did

The strategic half is lock-in. GPL code can be legally redistributed, and AI keeps making a plugin’s features cheaper to rebuild. A hosted service can’t be forked. It holds the customer’s data and the compute, and it bills on usage instead of asking for a yes or no at renewal time every year. With a SaaS backend, the core logic lives behind an API that AI can’t inspect or replicate.

Retention data backs this up, with caveats. WordPress products on annual licenses lose around 30% of their customers a year. Freemius’s benchmarks put it at 29% for plugins, 30.2% for add-ons, 29.3% for themes and 31.1% for bundles. Established B2B SaaS companies keep far more of their revenue:

• Benchmarkit’s 2026 report puts median gross revenue retention at 84% for 2025.
• The 2024 KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures SaaS survey puts gross retention at around 90%.
• SaaS Capital found a median of 91% for bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies with $3M to $20M in annual recurring revenue.

So established SaaS loses roughly 9 to 16% of its revenue a year, while WordPress products lose roughly 30% of their customers, somewhere around two to three times the rate. Worth keeping in mind: the two numbers don’t measure quite the same thing. The SaaS figures are revenue retention at bigger companies with higher contract values, and the Freemius figure is license churn, so treat the multiple as rough.

Price matters as much as the model. ChartMogul’s billing data shows companies charging under $25 a month per account lose a median 6.1% of customers every month, compared with 2.2% for those charging over $500 a month. Cheap SaaS churns hard. The stickiness comes from charging enough and from owning the customer’s workflow and data.

That’s why the examples that go furthest move up in price and take over the work: PMPro Max at $99 a month, Elementor One’s single subscription with pooled credits, Barn2 hosting the entire document library.

The tradeoff is real. Lock-in runs against the reason many people chose WordPress in the first place. They wanted to own their site, their data and their stack, and a hosted layer takes some of that back.

Customers want outcomes, not plugins

This is the part I feel most strongly about. It’s about outcomes, not about platforms anymore.

AI agents let customers ask for the result they want. Someone who needs a member directory, a translated site or a report on their brand can describe it to Claude or ChatGPT, and the software underneath becomes an implementation detail. What people want is their problems solved, and WordPress companies should be thinking the same way.

The pricing pages already show it. PMPro sells Do It For Me requests: you describe what you want and its team builds it. Elementor’s pricing page converts credits into “estimated monthly actions,” so buyers see accessibility fixes and optimized images instead of an abstract credit balance. Yoast AI+ sells a report on how AI models describe your brand, with no plugin involved. WPVibe bills on how much work your AI agent does on your site each day. Miles, a WordPress design agent, takes a brief and designs and builds the site, billed on monthly credits. GravityKit, where I work, offers the same kind of thing through Gravity Assist, a custom development service.

Automattic’s newest product points the same way. Spacefast is hosting for whatever your agent made, “anything that runs in a browser.” It’s built on the same infrastructure as WordPress.com, and every space is backed by a WordPress install, but the person publishing never sees it. Their agent hands over files and gets back a link.

That’s a big part of why I argued in July that WordPress needs a new MTP. Its original purpose, democratizing publishing, has largely been achieved, and agents care about the result far more than the platform that produced it.

Not everyone is going SaaS (and that’s fine)

Easy Digital Downloads went the other way. On September 23, it registered its store operations with the WordPress Abilities API, so Claude and ChatGPT can run reports and create discounts directly. There’s no hosted layer: the plugin stays a plugin, and AI connects to it.

Automattic has tried the hosted route and pulled back once already. Woo Express, launched in 2023, was a managed, hosted WooCommerce. Woo’s developer blog described it as having “the convenience of a SaaS product, but … strictly speaking is not SaaS at all.” It’s now “no longer available”, and the page sends buyers to WordPress.com plans.

Users are pushing back too. Crocoblock’s page builder report noted that “some long-time users still called it ‘SaaS creep’” when Elementor One arrived. A one-star review of Angie on WordPress.org says it’s designed “to try to convince you to get upgraded plan” and “will eat all your ‘credits’.” PMPro, for all its hosted tier, still publishes a guide to WordPress vs SaaS for membership sites that leans toward owning your stack.

And plenty of big names haven’t changed their model at all. Gravity Forms still sells yearly licenses with no hosted tier or credits, and Beaver Builder bundled its new AI features into its Plus plan and above, with no credits because you bring your own Anthropic or OpenAI API key. The list goes on.

Where this goes

My guess is that the SaaSification of WordPress continues, and probably speeds up. The cost of running AI isn’t going away, and neither is the pressure on renewals. It’ll be interesting to watch how it plays out.