We stopped paying for plugins and started building them

If you're a Jezweb client, there's a good chance you've never thought about most of your WordPress plugin licences. That's by design. We handle the bulk of them. You don't see the invoices, the renewal emails, the "your licence has expired" warnings. It just works.

Recently we've been replacing them with our own, built to better fit what our clients actually need.

We'd been thinking about this for a while. What we didn't have was the infrastructure to make it practical. You can't just build a plugin and manually install it on a hundred sites. You need a distribution system. So we built that first — a private update server that handles plugin distribution the same way WordPress.org does, but just for our clients. Once that was in place, the floodgates opened.

The floodgates really opened

Abner on our dev team built four major plugins in nine days in February. Order and shipment tracking for WooCommerce. A video embedding system. A frontend product editor so store owners can update products without logging into the admin. And a shipping integration that connects directly to the TNT Express Australia API with live freight rates.

That shipping plugin is worth mentioning because it simply doesn't exist on the open market. It knows about 1,287 regional and remote Australian postcodes that attract surcharges. It calculates public holidays algorithmically each year instead of using a hardcoded list that goes stale. Try finding that on the WordPress plugin marketplace. The market's too small for anyone overseas to bother building it properly for Australia.

Meanwhile Andrew on our support team kept finding opportunities from client work. "Do we have a replacement for Print Invoices?" "What about Product Configurator?" Each question became a new plugin on the list. Mahmud built a product sorting tool for one of our ecommerce clients and then stress-tested everyone else's plugins across dozens of different site configurations.

What we've replaced

The SEO plugin was the big one. Every WordPress site needs one, and we used to pay for Yoast or RankMath across hundreds of sites. JezPress SEO does what our clients actually need — meta tags, Open Graph, XML sitemaps, Schema.org. It also manages something called llms.txt, which helps AI search engines understand your site. The major SEO plugins are still catching up on that.

We also built our own Cloudflare Turnstile plugin for spam protection, a geo-blocking tool, an email double opt-in system, and a handful of WooCommerce tools for payment gateways, user approval workflows, and conditional payments.

No upsells. No dashboard ads. No annual renewals.

Why it matters beyond the money

According to Patchstack's annual security report, plugins account for 96% of all WordPress security vulnerabilities. When a vulnerability is found in a popular plugin, every site running it is exposed until the vendor releases a patch. Sometimes that takes days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes the plugin gets abandoned and the patch never comes.

When we own the code, we don't wait. We fix it and push an update to every site that needs it the same day. No support ticket. No workaround. No hoping someone upstream is paying attention.

What this means for you

Custom functionality for your website is dramatically more affordable than it used to be. Something you've wanted on your site but assumed would cost too much? A workflow that doesn't quite fit any off-the-shelf plugin? A shipping integration that actually understands your business?

Those conversations are worth having now. The answer might surprise you.