Why desk9 caps the catalog at 25 products
The economics of maintaining software forever instead of shipping more of it.
d9
Published
Maintenance is the product
A plugin that isn’t updated is a liability sitting on someone else’s website. Your subscription doesn’t buy the download — it funds the eighteen releases that come after it. That’s the whole business model, stated plainly.
What the cap changes
A hard limit forces real decisions. A new product only ships when a real problem shows up repeatedly in support — and it competes against improving what already exists. Eleven products today, fourteen slots open, no roadmap theater.
What it means for you
Nothing in the catalog is abandoned, ever. If we sunset something (hasn’t happened yet), subscribers get years of notice and a migration path. Small catalog, long promises.
d9
About the author
desk9 is a one-developer WordPress shop. Every article here documents something built, measured or broken first-hand — maintaining a small catalog of plugins and themes across thousands of live sites.