Hello webmasters, I want to read about your experience with selling code and making money programming in general.
When digitalpoint was free and popular I sold 4 sponsored themes and 3 paid wordpress themes. It was very easy in those days. But now since DP is dead I haven't sold 1 line of code for over 13 years.
I tried my hand at creating WordPress plugins, but the problem is marketing and standing out. Plugins have to be free to gain interest, or have a free and pro version. Additionally, selling your own code is not particularly attractive from a business point of view. If you have a plugin that costs $49, even with 100 sales, it's still only $4900. If I were to think about creating code for sale now, I would choose a subscription-based option. Moreover, I recommend looking into areas where there is money, such as e-commerce.
Are you joking? The market is saturated, most people are sure, that they know everything, and do not want to learn anything new. Thus, it is difficult now to persuade people even to try your product free of charge (gratis), and almost impossible to sell anything.
The situation is different when it comes to earning money as a programmer in a corporation. I've been working in various companies for 5 years and you can make good money there. I don't know what level you are at, but if you have experience, maybe a better option would be to educate others, for example, by creating online courses. Many people want to enter the IT industry and it's enough to compare: Online course: you don't have to worry about multi-year support for people who have already bought it, contrary to appearances, a course, especially a well-advertised one, can be sold for $100 or more. creating a course takes a similar amount of time as completing one project. Plugins/themes for sale: support for different versions of software, e.g. WordPress, outside of the e-commerce industry, it's hard to sell for more than $50, for a project to become popular, you have to devote a lot of time to it, sometimes even a year. After several unsuccessful attempts to develop my own programming startups, I went in the direction of online courses. If you're planning to create a course and looking for marketing, I'm currently developing coursecrit.com, an app with reviews of online courses, and I can write a review.