I submitted a feature request for a popular theme and in the discussion with the developer he told me that the majority of purchasers of themes and plugins are individual site owners or people building a site for their company, not professional site builders.
The majority of purchasers of themes and plugins are individual site owners or people building a site for their company.
Aside from products built specifically for developers or agencies, this information has a profound impact on the type of product features, documentation, and support requirements that a product needs. I imagine it is a bit of a juggling act to price packages and prioritize features so as to appeal to individual purchasers and site builders.
When a single site builder is your audience then paid advertising makes a lot of sense. Elementor and Automattic come to mind. In this context, Elementor’s pricing and Elementor Cloud make a lot of sense.
In other contexts, software companies realize that professionals play an outsized role in promoting and influencing public opinion, for example, Microsoft caters to developers and has some of the best developer tools (including the free Visual Studio Code).
