Not only that, but so many people are reluctant to pay for anything so your average installation is chock full of freemium plugins. I've worked on plenty of sites whose admin page looked a bit like the IE6 toolbar meme.

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Pikamander2 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The premium plugins are arguably even worse.

Unlike the free plugins, they're not reviewed by the WordPress.org team, and if you stop paying for them then you'll lose access to their future plugin updates, including critical security fixes.

I wouldn't say that their code quality is noticably higher, either; there have been countless CVEs for premium WordPress plugins over the years, and no shortage of discontinued/abandoned premium plugins that are no longer being maintained but are still installed on thousands of sites.

	▲	sunnybeetroot a day ago \| parent [-]
		It makes sense that you wouldn’t receive updates if you stopped paying. You’re paying for the labour up until that point. It’s like paying to have your grass mowed and then complaining because it wasn’t mowed again in the future without you paying.

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BenjiWiebe 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmmm... I'm reluctant to pay for WordPress plugins because a bunch of them are also single purpose plugins from random developers, and of questionable quality.

	▲	post-it 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		And they also make your WP admin page look like an IE6 toolbar.