Paid Memberships Pro

Jason Coleman built Paid Memberships Pro as a specialized tool to solve the membership site problem on WordPress. Rather than trying to be a general e-commerce solution like WooCommerce or Shopify, Jason focused specifically on the membership use case—charging for content access while locking down member-only pages. The plugin is open-source and GPL-licensed, allowing anyone to use it for free while monetizing through premium support and add-ons.

Jason came from a consulting background but made a deliberate decision to go all-in on the product. "Last year was the year that we kind of unloaded all of our consulting clients and went full-time on the product that we sell," he explained. His business model avoided the typical SaaS pitfalls—instead of monthly subscriptions, he charged annually ($97 and $200 per year for the premium PM Pro Plus tier), which reduced churn concerns while building recurring revenue.

Growth came entirely through organic discovery. With 40,000 free sites using the plugin, Jason converted roughly 10% into paying customers through embedded links within the software directing users to upgrade. "Our funnel really comes through the software itself," he said. When WordPress users searched for membership functionality, they stumbled upon Paid Memberships Pro. This product-led approach meant zero paid acquisition spending—a massive advantage for profitability.

The decision to focus on a single product paid dividends. Jason reflected: "When I got into entrepreneurship, I was working on like three different business ventures at the same time... probably part of the success of Paid Memberships Pro is that when we started with it, we said, Hey, we're going to [focus on] this is the one thing we're doing." By pricing at $170 average annual revenue per customer and processing millions of dollars monthly through PayPal alone (with similar volumes on Stripe), the unit economics worked.

He kept costs lean with three part-time contractors and his wife handling operations, totaling $7,000-$10,000 monthly. This left $10,000-$20,000 monthly profit depending on owner distributions. The model was working, but Jason wanted to scale further—he aimed to hire a lead developer ($10,000/month) to replace himself so he could pursue other ventures.

By 2016, Paid Memberships Pro was doing $30,000 monthly revenue with 3,000-5,000 paying customers. The business was projected to hit $360,000+ annually while maintaining 100% ownership between Jason and his wife. Jason, living in Reading, Pennsylvania with two young children, had repositioned the business toward his long-term goal: becoming the number one membership platform for WordPress, which he noted "really means on the internet since WordPress is running so much on the internet."