How Michael is making a living from two WooCommerce plugins

Meet Michael Barinov.

Michael was born in Belarus and now lives in Poland, where he specializes in building plugins for WooCommerce.

He has been working with WordPress for more than 10 years. He started out by learning the basics and taking on simple freelance jobs.

Later, Michael created several WordPress themes but eventually switched to plugins. Design was never his strongest skill, and back then the plugin ecosystem felt far less crowded.

Today, running and selling two plugins - Advanced Woo Search and Advanced Woo Lables - is his full-time job.

Today, I have two main WordPress plugins that generate most of my income: Advanced Woo Search and Advanced Woo Labels

Advanced Woo Search is almost 10 years old, while the initial version of Advanced Woo Labels was released in 2020.

The idea for Advanced Woo Labels came when I wanted to create a small WooCommerce plugin and see how it would perform. I already had Advanced Woo Search, which brought a steady cash flow, and simply wanted to build something new. The development, however, took longer than expected - around 6 months - and the plugin finally launched in mid-2020.

Advanced Woo Labels comes in two versions: free and paid. Technically, they are two separate plugins. The paid version includes more advanced features missing from the free one. It’s subscription-based and renews yearly - a standard pricing model for WordPress plugins.

My main distribution channel has always been wordpress.org, the largest repository of free WordPress plugins. Users can search for almost any type of plugin here and install it for free.

The free version of Advanced Woo Labels has been available since day one. It can be used without any limits forever. If a user needs more advanced features, they can upgrade to the paid version. The free plugin includes a few promotional sections that inform users about the paid version.

Today, Advanced Woo Labels has over 10,000+ active free installs.

My first 100 customers came entirely from the free version on wordpress.org. Reaching that first milestone took around 16 months. Yes, that sounds long - mostly because I didn’t use any additional marketing channels besides the plugin repository.

When your plugin is new, it’s hard to gain visibility in the beginning.

But things change over time. If the first 100 customers took 16 months, the next 100 came within just 7 months. Here is a chart of Advanced Woo Labels sales from 2020 showing how the numbers have been steadily growing month by month.

Currently, Advanced Woo Labels shows the following numbers:

Active paid customers: 350
Average MRR: around $1,800
Average monthly revenue: around $1,700

November 2025 reached an all-time high with $3,500 in revenue. Not bad for a small WordPress plugin.

Both revenue and MRR fluctuate quite a bit from month to month, mostly because of the annual subscription model and the availability of a lifetime license option.

The main marketing channel remains the same as always - the wordpress.org repository, where the free version of the plugin brings most of the visibility and conversions.

The plugin website contributes another ~15% of sales. Outside of that, I don’t use any other marketing channels.

You can find Michael on X.

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.