We had raccoons in our backyard.
From a few feet away, they look cute. But they're not cute. And I don't know if you know this, but their feces is bad news.
So if you have grapevines in your backyard, and they come eating, and start treating your yard like a latrine – and you have small children – things are not going to go well for you.
We didn't know this until my wife started calling around to see who could give us advice about the raccoons. That's when we found out we had some serious stuff to deal with.
At that point, let me ask you this…
You have two little kids (both under 5). They're out back playing with dirt and mud – which you now think could be contaminated.
How much would you pay for the safety of your children? How much would you pay for someone to come cut all the grapevines out, and to get the raccoons to leave?
Me? I would have paid any amount. Anything at all.
I know others in a similar spot.
They may not have kids. They may not have raccoons. But I know friends who have a plugin they've developed and it's their baby.
I know. It's not really their baby.
But they spend hard-earned money to protect it.
Protect it from a security perspective, protect it from a support perspective, and from an overall health perspective (constantly refactoring it to keep it healthy).
Many times they invest more than you or I know, just to keep things moving.
Plugin support is expensive.
You've read the post. You've seen the year-end summaries.
Supporting a popular plugin costs money, and requires staff.
So how much do you think it would be worth, if these plugin owners could lower their plugin support costs?
What if they didn't have to spend more than $34/month?
I don't know if you caught it but today some friends of mine finally launched Sidekick.
(Yes, that's why I picked that image at the top. Otherwise I would have gone with a nice raccoon face.)
It's a plugin that lets you create custom tutorials inside of the admin side of WordPress to train people to solve their own problems that they might have with your plugin.
It can reduce the cost of support quickly and easily. Simply by creating custom-walkthrus.
And you can do it for as little as $34 every month.
Getting rid of grapevines and raccoons cost me about a year's worth of Sidekick services. And I considered it a bargain.
I'm guessing that if you have your own custom plugin, and are faced with a lot of support, you might find this a bargain as well.