I couldn’t afford the plugins my clients’ sites needed.
So I built 99Plugs.

I'm Shawn. I've been building WordPress sites since 2012, and 99Plugs started as my own problem.

I was a local web designer working with small businesses in my area. WordPress was free. The plugins I needed to build a decent site were not. One plugin to connect a site to an email platform ran three hundred dollars on its own, on a project that paid fifteen hundred. Add the rest of what a real site needs and the free platform was costing me more than the paid ones it was supposed to beat.

So I went looking for another way and found GPL sites. My first thought was that it had to be piracy. It isn't, and reading the license is what convinced me. My second thought was that they were all malware. That one deserves to be taken seriously, and checking out a lot of them is what answered it: they are not all the same. [Here's the whole story of what I learned]

So I used the good ones, and for a while I was happy. Real plugins, at a price my business could carry. One problem left. Updates.

Every new version meant going back to the site, checking, downloading a zip, and uploading it by hand to every website running that plugin. Every time. That was the price of cheaper plugins, and I paid it for years.

Then I found an old GitHub project for running your own plugin repository. Drop a new version into a folder, and WordPress spots it and shows the Update Now link like any other update. Better. Not fixed. I was still checking by hand, still downloading, still moving files into that folder, and every new site meant more code in functions.php before it would talk to the thing.

Closing that last gap is what 99Plugs was built for. Not the discount. Anybody can sell a file cheap. The part that took the research and the testing was making updates arrive in your dashboard on their own, for every plugin, on every site, with nothing for you to check.

That's what a VIP Access Pass is. The plugins you need at a price a small shop can afford, and updates that show up the way the free ones from WordPress.org do. We've been at it since 2020.