I am busy writing a plugin with a free version and a paid, Pro version. For our initial release of both versions, I want to keep things as simple as possible, so I would rather defer using a strategy of a very extensible free version, with hooks implemented in a Pro version; I will give this direction some attention for later releases. My next avenue is to simply have two completely separate builds that include some core, shared components, and some components specific to the Pro or Free versions.
The purpose of my question here is to try and gather some advice on my third angle, that of using checks in code that only perform actions etc. if a certain version is running, i.e. if the client calling core services is Free or Pro. What should I be looking at to attempt this avenue of feature limiting?
2 Answers
You alluded to this in your comments, one way is to provide an API key for your plugin, that way your clients are actually paying for support and updates and not code, it’s really one of the only decent ways to go about this. For example if their API key is not valid or expires they do not get access to your private forum or any plugin updates ( you would need of course to provide a API for a unique key, external update request and authentication).
