Every page ranking for this comparison answers a different question: which platform a shop owner should use. Nobody has measured which one an independent developer should build in. We measured seven of them the same way on the same day.
If you can write software and you want to sell it, the platform you build on changes your odds more than almost anything else you control. Nobody has measured by how much.
So we did. Seven plugin and app ecosystems, one matching rule, one query, one day. The headline result is that Shopify is the only ecosystem in which an independent developer is more likely to reach $1,000 a month than in software generally, and that the ecosystems attracting the most venture capital are the ones where independent developers earn the least.
Build the Shopify app. It is the only ecosystem that beats the baseline (11.9% of products clear $1,000 a month against 10.3% for startups generally), it is the only one where the platform bills for you, and it takes 0% of your first million. Build a WordPress plugin if control matters more than the multiple. Build a Chrome extension to test an idea cheaply, not to keep the business there. The part no platform helps with is picking the problem, which is what BigIdeasDB is for.
We read the pages currently ranking for this question. Nearly all of them answer a different one: whether a shop owner should run their store on Shopify or WordPress. That is a useful article and it is not this article.
The developer-side question, which platform is the better place to build and sell software, has one thin result and no data behind it anywhere. The reason is structural: the people with the strongest incentive to write it are platform vendors, and each of them only knows their own ecosystem. A WordPress commerce company cannot tell you Shopify pays better. We have no stake in any of them, and the same measurement applied to all seven.
One query, one matching rule per ecosystem, applied identically so the differences reflect the platforms rather than the filter.
| Ecosystem | Tracked | Earning $0 | Clearing $1,000/mo | Average MRR | Funded companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 42 | 54.8% | 11.9% | $806 | 50 |
| Webflow | 9 | 44.4% | 11.1% | $1,128 | 8 |
| WordPress | 36 | 50.0% | 8.3% | $568 | 5 |
| Chrome extensions | 88 | 52.3% | 6.8% | $347 | 13 |
| Notion | 32 | 59.4% | 3.1% | $1,192 | 25 |
| Figma | 21 | 66.7% | 0.0% | $20 | 29 |
| Zapier | 6 | 66.7% | 0.0% | $85 | 13 |
| All tracked startups (baseline) | 8,600+ | 56.5% | 10.3% | — | — |
The baseline is the number most of this analysis hangs on. Across every revenue-verified startup we track, in every category, on every platform, 10.3% clear $1,000 a month. That is the general difficulty of software.
Shopify comes in at 11.9%. Everything else comes in below. Building a plugin is usually a way of making a hard thing harder, and Shopify is the exception rather than the rule. For the general population this is measured against, see startup failure statistics and the state of indie SaaS revenue.
Webflow at 11.1% is technically at the baseline, but on nine tracked products. We are not going to build an argument on nine.
What that difficulty feels like from inside is worth hearing. From a Shopify developer six months in: “You work hard to build and validate the app, finally get listed and then discover you’re buried on page 29 with almost no installations.” — r/ShopifyAppDev. And from an extension developer: “I launched my first ever Shopify app last week... it’s been complete silence. Literally 0 installs in 7 days.” — r/ShopifyAppDev
Not a rounding artefact. Of 21 tracked Figma-related products, none clear $1,000 a month, and average revenue is about $20. Zapier, on a much smaller sample of six, is also at zero.
Both ecosystems have large, enthusiastic communities and a constant stream of people building for them. What they do not have is a mechanism by which those builders get paid. That is not a criticism of the products; it is a description of the commercial surface. The pattern repeats wherever a platform builds a community without building a way to pay its builders, which is the same structural point made in micro SaaS without API dependency and how we score opportunities.
This is the finding we did not expect and the one we would keep if we could only keep one.
| Ecosystem | Funded companies | Independents clearing $1,000/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Figma | 29 | 0.0% |
| Notion | 25 | 3.1% |
| Zapier | 13 | 0.0% |
| Chrome extensions | 13 | 6.8% |
| Webflow | 8 | 11.1% |
| WordPress | 5 | 8.3% |
| Shopify | 50 | 11.9% |
Read the top and bottom rows together. The ecosystem with the most venture-backed companies after Shopify has zero independent developers clearing a thousand dollars a month. The ecosystem with the fewest funded companies in the entire comparison has one of the better independent success rates.
Shopify is the single exception where capital and independent success point the same way, and we think the reason is the billing rail: it makes the ecosystem attractive to funded companies and to solo developers for the same underlying reason.
The practical lesson is blunt. An ecosystem being fashionable with investors is not evidence that you can earn in it. Often it is the opposite, because funded companies occupy exactly the surface area an independent would have taken. This is the same dynamic we described in what counts as a moat in the AI era and what actually gets funded.
Sort the ecosystems by how the money reaches the developer and you get almost exactly the revenue ranking back.
| Billing situation | Ecosystems | Clearing $1,000/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Platform bills the customer for you | Shopify | 11.9% |
| No rail, but a professional buyer | WordPress, Webflow | 8.3% to 11.1% |
| Rail existed and was removed | Chrome extensions | 6.8% |
| No rail and a prosumer audience | Notion, Figma, Zapier | 0.0% to 3.1% |
Shopify charges merchants on the invoice they already pay, handles plan selection, approvals and metering, and takes 15% of annual gross app revenue and 0% on the first $1,000,000 for eligible developers since January 2025.
For an independent developer that means the platform cut is effectively zero until the business is already substantial, and the hardest commercial problem in software, getting someone to enter a card, is solved before you start. Merchants feel the other side of that convenience: “Need a feature? App. Need another feature? Another app... And of course none of these apps cost $99. They cost $29 a month, $49 a month, $99 a month, forever.” — r/shopify. That complaint is your revenue. And the merchant lock-in that frustrates them is what makes your renewal durable: “Migrating an established e-commerce business is brutal... Leaving isn’t just canceling Shopify and pointing the domain somewhere else.” — r/shopify
WordPress.org takes nothing because it gives nothing. There is no billing, no subscription management and no entitlement system, and the directory guidelines explicitly prohibit trialware and serving paid updates from your own server. Every developer assembles a checkout, licence keys, an update server and a customer area themselves.
The GPL compounds it. You cannot withhold source, so what you sell is updates, support and trust rather than code. A developer in the ecosystem put the resulting culture plainly: “users dont see compatibility fixes as value. they see it as ‘it should just work.’” — r/Wordpress. Another developer in that ecosystem summarised the commercial consequence of no rail and one-time pricing: “You think you’re building a business but you’re really just building a support queue that grows forever while revenue flatlines.” — r/Wordpress
And the GPL reality that shapes what you can even sell: “When you purchase a plugin, you buy access to support and updates, not the plugin itself.” — r/Wordpress. Full detail in the WordPress deep dive.
Chrome is the natural experiment. It had a billing system, Chrome Web Store Payments, at a 5% fee. Google announced its permanent shutdown in September 2020 and never replaced it.
Everything downstream follows: the lowest average revenue of the three major ecosystems at $347, a 6.8% success rate, and a market where public milestone posts celebrate a first $9 customer. One developer’s post title was simply “My Chrome extension has hit $100 MRR!” — r/chrome_extensions, after starting in 2024. The milestone ladder in that community is the clearest picture of the ceiling: “I just got my first paying customer. I know it’s ‘just’ $9, but I can’t stop smiling.” — r/chrome_extensions, and “After 1.8 years, I have finally hit 100+ paying customers.” — r/chrome_extensions.
These three combine the Chrome problem with a harder one. There is no billing rail, and the audience is prosumer: individuals buying with their own money for professional work, inside a product they already pay a subscription for.
Asking someone to pay a second subscription to improve the first is a difficult sale, and the numbers reflect it. Figma’s $20 average across 21 tracked products is the clearest statement of it in the dataset. Compare that with what a professional buyer in a paying ecosystem says: “If the plugin is good and there is solid support, I have no issue paying $79-$100 per year for it.” — r/Wordpress
| Ecosystem | Listings | Median profit multiple | Median margin | Median ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome extensions | 9 | 4.40x | 73.3% | $249,000 |
| Webflow | 10 | 4.00x | — | — |
| Figma | 5 | 4.00x | — | — |
| Notion | 4 | 3.95x | — | — |
| Shopify apps | 29 | 3.90x | 85.4% | $250,000 |
| WordPress plugins and themes | 11 | 2.80x | 88.9% | $120,000 |
| Zapier | 5 | 2.50x | — | — |
Shopify has by far the largest and therefore most trustworthy sample at 29 listings. It also has the highest median asking price. Individual Shopify listings show what the top of that distribution looks like: “$700K ARR, 2,500+ Merchants, 80K+ Txns/month, $80M GMV/year” — acquire.com listing, and “$437k ARR, $170k Profit, 500+ Merchants” — acquire.com listing. See SaaS valuation multiples for how to read these.
Chrome extensions have the highest median exit multiple and nearly the lowest success rate. This is the most misreadable pair of numbers in the analysis and we are not going to smooth it into one impression.
The multiple is computed across nine businesses that survived long enough to be listed for sale. The success rate is computed across 88 products, most of which did not. A high survivor multiple in a low-survival market is exactly what a lottery looks like: the prize is real and the probability is poor.
Shopify’s 3.90x is a lower prize with much better odds, measured on three times the sample. Given the choice, take the odds. For how buyers actually arrive at these numbers, see the due diligence checklist and the state of SaaS acquisitions.
WordPress plugin businesses run at an 88.9% median margin, the highest of the three we could compute, and carry the lowest multiple at 2.80x. Shopify is at 85.4% and 3.90x. Chrome at 73.3% and 4.40x.
There is no relationship between margin and multiple here, which tells you buyers are not pricing cost structure. They are pricing whether next year’s revenue shows up. A 97% margin with no renewals is a liquidating annuity, and it gets priced like one. A WordPress developer described exactly why the renewals do not arrive: “people just dont renew. they use the plugin for years on whatever version they have and only come back when something breaks.” — r/Wordpress. And a theme author reported the end state: “when I ask them to renew support when they create a ticket, they told me that I am a scammer!” — r/Wordpress More on that in what transfers when you sell.
Shopify sells to merchants. WordPress sells largely to agencies, who buy licences as a cost of doing business, across an install base that covers 40.3% of all websites. Chrome sells to consumers at more than four to one. Notion and Figma sell to prosumers. The Shopify equivalent of the agency buyer is the merchant with revenue at stake: “E-commerce is where the money is.” — r/Wordpress, said by a WordPress developer about his own ecosystem.
The ordering of the revenue table is very close to the ordering of those audiences by willingness to pay. The blunt version came from a WordPress developer: “Site owners that DIY don’t pay for anything, target devs.” — r/Wordpress. An agency owner spelled out the purchase logic that makes professional buyers valuable: “we spend a lot of money on licenses when they ... solve a business problem for a customer that increases their revenue or reduces their administrative / process driven people expenses.” — r/Wordpress. An extension developer put the other end of the spectrum just as clearly: “There are no real extensions users here, only other chrome extension builders.” — r/chrome_extensions. Nobody says that about a browser add-on. Our corpus-scale version of the same finding is in who micro SaaS actually sells to.
Whatever platform you pick, the same mistake is waiting: thousands of users each paying almost nothing.
A Shopify translation app in our data reports “9,000+ Merchants, $290K ARR” — acquire.com listing, on $42,000 profit, roughly $2.69 per merchant per month. A WooCommerce shipping plugin earns $2,982 a month from 1,172 customers, about $2.54 each. Meanwhile an extension developer running four paid products reports “~$4.3K MRR · 72 subs · ~91% margin” — revenue-verified product listing, roughly $60 per subscriber.
Seventy-two customers beat nine thousand. A merchant did the arithmetic from the buying side: “three apps costing $39 per month would total $1,404 per year.” — r/shopify. That is the budget you are competing for, and it is far larger than the $2.69 most plugin businesses actually capture. A WooCommerce seller described the same squeeze from the developer side: “Selling WordPress plugins, modules that extend site functionality” — revenue-verified product listing, at $391 a month. Price for revenue per customer in every ecosystem. See what micro SaaS actually charges and how to price a micro SaaS.
Shopify is the most visibly crowded and the most measurable. A May 2026 index counted 21,509 public apps live with 2,713 launched in that month alone.
The right way to read saturation in any of these stores was stated by the developer who ran that index: “App count tells you supply. Reviews tell you demand. A category with many apps but few new reviews can be dangerous.” — r/ShopifyAppDev. The same index found the trap in shipping volume instead of depth: “Shipping more apps is not a strategy by itself. In a marketplace, distribution compounds more than product count.” — r/ShopifyAppDev. Apply that method to whichever store you pick, and see the micro SaaS competition map plus low competition SaaS ideas.
Chrome is cheapest by a distance: days of work, a free listing, no meaningful review gauntlet. WordPress is next: no review for a paid plugin sold from your own site, but you must build the entire commercial stack. Shopify is the most expensive to enter, because App Store review is a real process that costs rounds.
Note that the ordering of entry cost is the inverse of the ordering of returns. That is not a coincidence, it is the barrier doing its job. Shopify developers describe review as an alignment exercise rather than a QA pass: “The review isn’t really about whether your app works, it’s about whether it matches Shopify’s mental model of how apps should behave.” — r/shopify. Compare with how small your MVP should be and launching in a weekend.
WordPress wins this one outright and it is the reason to choose it. No review process, no revenue share, no listing that can be removed, no partner terms that can change under you. You own the relationship and the risk.
Shopify is the opposite trade: maximum commercial infrastructure, minimum sovereignty. Chrome sits between, with a free listing and no billing, which is arguably the worst of both. The WordPress trade has its own cost though, and it is cultural rather than technical: “Subscriptions for Wordpress plugins are ridiculous and overly priced in the majority of cases.” — r/Wordpress. That is the buyer you own outright. The upside is that nobody can take the listing away: “I’ve bought exactly one thing off a marketplace in 13 years of using WP.” — r/Wordpress, which is an argument for owning your own storefront in any ecosystem.
| Risk | Shopify | WordPress | Chrome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listing can be removed | Yes | Free version only | Yes |
| Reviews can be deleted | Yes, has happened | Free version only | Yes |
| Platform can ship your feature | Yes, frequently | Yes, via core | Yes, via browser |
| Terms can change under you | Yes, has happened | Directory rules only | Yes, billing removed in 2020 |
| Revenue share can change | Yes | No share exists | No share exists |
| Measure | Winner |
|---|---|
| Odds of reaching $1,000 a month | Shopify (11.9%) |
| Median asking price at exit | Shopify ($250,000) |
| Median exit multiple | Chrome (4.40x, tiny sample) |
| Profit margin | WordPress (88.9%) |
| Billing infrastructure | Shopify (0% to $1M) |
| Speed to launch | Chrome (days) |
| Independence from a platform | WordPress |
| Audience willingness to pay | Shopify (merchants) |
You want the best odds and the best exit, your problem touches a merchant’s money, and you can tolerate a review process and a platform that could ship your feature. This is the default recommendation for most people most of the time. Start with the Shopify deep dive.
Sovereignty matters more to you than the multiple, you are comfortable building the entire commercial stack, and your buyer is an agency rather than a hobbyist. You will earn a lower multiple and answer to nobody. The developers who make it work are explicit about who they sell to: “Devs don’t mind paying for licenses. We have dozens of developer licenses for the plugins we like to use.” — r/Wordpress. Start with the WordPress deep dive and pricing strategy.
You want to find out whether anyone wants this at the lowest possible cost, this week. It is the best testing ground in software and a poor place to leave a business. Move the account into a web app the moment it works. One extension developer showed what good looks like at that scale: “100% traffic comes from SEO. I currently spend about 20 minutes per week on customer support.” — revenue-verified product listing. Start with the Chrome deep dive and Chrome extension ideas ranked by demand.
Your problem does not naturally live inside someone else’s product. A plugin is a distribution strategy, not a product strategy, and it costs you a platform dependency permanently. If the problem stands alone, build a standalone product and read how to build a SaaS or micro SaaS examples instead. The independent route also avoids the risk a platform developer named bluntly: “All plugin developers have their days numbered.” — r/Wordpress
It works, and the acquisition data shows it. One listing is “A suite of apps (20 Shopify+5 BigCommerce) for simplifying the day-to-day functions of store owners” — acquire.com listing, at $183,000 revenue and $147,000 profit.
The sequencing matters though. Win one ecosystem, then port. A developer who indexed the Shopify store found the opposite approach fails: “One developer has 151 apps live, but only 20 total reviews across all of them” — r/ShopifyAppDev.
Everything above collapses into an order of operations. The next eight sections are that order, and the first one is the one people skip.
Choosing the ecosystem first is choosing a distribution channel before you know what you are distributing. Find a documented, unmet problem, then let the problem tell you whose product it lives inside. The failure mode is universal: “you need to fix a problem that pertains to a considerable number of users, a problem that’s not already fixed by one or more of the plugins out there.” — r/Wordpress Start at the pain points database, the complaint browser or documented business pain points, and read how to validate a startup idea plus finding problems worth solving.
It is the single strongest predictor in this entire dataset. If the platform does not bill, budget real time for building checkout, licensing and entitlement before you write a feature, and price accordingly. Developers in no-rail ecosystems consistently describe this as the thing that cost them years: “I had a rough time figuring out various monetization plan and finally settled with a subscription plan and a BYOK plan.” — r/chrome_extensions
Businesses pay, consumers resist, prosumers are already paying for the host product. If the ecosystem’s population is consumer, your ceiling is set before you start: “Users who build sites for themselves with small budgets complain about subscription model.” — r/Wordpress. See who micro SaaS actually sells to and how to find a profitable niche.
Supply tells you how crowded the shelf looks. Reviews tell you whether anyone is still buying. A category with hundreds of products and no recent reviews is a graveyard that looks like a market. Cross-check with low competition SaaS ideas.
An acquisition listing in your niche is the strongest available proof that the problem monetises, because someone built it, ran it and found a buyer. Some sellers even publish the whole history: “Since 2016, we sold $416k+ ... all of our sales are organic. We didn’t spend a penny on marketing.” — acquire.com listing. Sellers are usually leaving for attention reasons rather than failure: “I want to focus on my WordPress membership plugin and WP to CRM automation plugin” — acquire.com listing. Browse acquisition listings, how to use listings as validation and finding execution gaps.
On this evidence, venture interest is not a proxy for opportunity and may be a counter-indicator for independents. Figma at 29 funded companies and 0.0% independent success is the cleanest illustration available. Check the funded company database to see where money is going, then decide deliberately whether you want to be there.
Covered above and worth repeating because it is the most common way a technically successful plugin becomes a commercially failed one. Tier on something that grows with the customer. See SaaS metrics benchmarks and MRR vs ARR vs TTM revenue for what to track once you do.
Every ecosystem in this comparison can remove your listing or delete your reviews. Content, search presence and an email list are the assets that survive that. A Shopify developer stated the consequence of not owning one: “If your app exists only inside the app store, has no presence outside Shopify, isn’t mentioned in real conversations. You’re invisible to a lot of demand.” — r/ShopifyAppDev. This is also how buyers separate a business from a listing, per how to sell your SaaS and what transfers in a sale.
We would revise the conclusion if any of the following happened: Chrome restored a billing rail, WordPress.org adopted commerce primitives, Figma or Notion shipped real monetisation for third-party builders, or Shopify raised its revenue share materially.
The last one is the live risk for anyone taking our recommendation. Shopify’s 0% tier is a policy, not a law, and policies move. Build so that a change in the share hurts your margin rather than ending your business. The precedent is not hypothetical: a partner-terms update in the Shopify ecosystem prompted a developer to ask “Does that mean all ai apps are now banned?” — r/shopify, and extension developers watched a widely used billing vendor wind down with 60 days notice: “Having to replace billing, analytics, email, affiliates, and everything else within a few months isn’t exactly a small migration.” — r/ShopifyAppDev
Two pressures, in opposite directions. Simple plugins in every ecosystem are becoming trivially replicable, which compresses the low end everywhere. And discovery is moving upstream of the stores. A developer put it precisely: “The Shopify App Store no longer creates demand. It only converts it.” — r/ShopifyAppDev
An extension developer reached the same conclusion independently: “Getting cited in LLMs are probably going to be an even bigger market then SEO is right now.” — r/chrome_extensions. A WordPress developer reached it from the third direction: “Plugin marketplaces are just not it anymore. The audience of developers who would use that as a resource are also capable of building the plugin they need with agentic tools.” — r/Wordpress
Whichever ecosystem you pick, the listing is now the last step in the funnel rather than the first. What survives is depth: compatibility maintenance, regulatory correctness and integrations with real access barriers, as covered in what counts as a moat in the AI era and single-feature micro SaaS ideas. See optimising for AI Overviews.
This page compares the ecosystems. Each of these takes one apart in full, with pricing, licensing, distribution, support and exit planning specific to that platform:
This comparison exists because we hold the data to compute it, and BigIdeasDB is the tool we would use for the step it cannot answer for you, which is which problem to solve.
We maintain 1M+ documented complaints alongside revenue-verified products, live acquisition listings, funded-company records and a payment index of 30,000+ companies. That lets you answer, before writing code:
Pair it with ChatGPT or Claude for code and Google Trends for direction. Neither holds a complaint corpus. Start at the discovery tool, the idea browser, or read how the validation tool works.
| Source | Used for | Evidence type | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue-verified products (8,600+) | Revenue-reaching rates, average MRR, zero rates | Connected payment data | Per-ecosystem samples run from 6 to 88. Zapier (6), Webflow (9) and Notion/Figma (32/21) are thin; only Shopify, WordPress and Chrome carry real weight. Self-selects toward founders who publish revenue. |
| Acquisition listings (650+ live) | Exit multiples, margins, asking prices | Seller-reported financials | Samples of 4 to 29. These are asking prices, not verified closed sales, and they measure survivors rather than the population. |
| Funded company index (17,000+) | Venture interest per ecosystem | Funding announcements | Keyword match on company self-description, not a census. Directionally strong, not exact. |
| Published platform terms | Revenue share, billing availability | Vendor documentation and press record | Terms change. Verified September 2026; re-check before relying on the 0% tier. |
| Live developer communities | Lived experience, quoted | Self-reported accounts | Unverified individual claims. Used as illustration, never as measurement. Usernames stripped. |
They do, slightly, and the reason matters more than the difference.
This page applies one narrow matching rule per ecosystem so the seven are comparable. The individual deep dives use broader, ecosystem-specific rules to capture as much of each market as possible. So Chrome shows 6.8% on 88 products here and 6.3% on 112 in the deep dive, because that article also matched “browser extension”. WordPress shows 8.3% on 36 here and 10.0% on 40 there, because that article also matched WooCommerce.
Neither is wrong. Comparability requires one rule; depth requires the wider one. Use this page to choose between platforms and the deep dives to understand one.
Whether your product will work. These are base rates across tracked populations, and a base rate is not a forecast. An excellent WordPress plugin will beat a mediocre Shopify app every time. One WordPress operator reports the model working exactly as intended: “I offer monthly, annual and lifetime for my plugins, and 95% of my customers choose monthly/annual over lifetime, and they stick around as well.” — r/Wordpress
What a base rate does is tell you which way the wind blows before you set off. Use it to break a tie, not to make the decision for you. And note that every ecosystem here has at least one operator quietly doing well in it, including the ones at the bottom of our table: “My plugins are super niche, so no.” — r/Wordpress, answering whether AI had hurt revenue.
Search 1M+ documented complaints, revenue-verified products and live acquisition listings to find a problem people already pay to solve, then choose the ecosystem its owner lives in.
Start with real complaints →Shopify, on every measure we can compute. Among revenue-verified products, 11.9% of Shopify-related ones clear $1,000 per month against 8.3% for WordPress. Shopify app businesses carry a 3.90x median profit multiple against 2.80x for WordPress plugin and theme products, and a $250,000 median asking price against $120,000.
Shopify, and it is the only one that beats the baseline. Across 8,600+ revenue-verified startups of every kind, 10.3% clear $1,000 per month. Shopify-related products hit 11.9%. Every other ecosystem we measured comes in below: WordPress 8.3%, Chrome extensions 6.8%, Notion 3.1%, Figma and Zapier 0.0%.
Because of how the money arrives, not how the software is built. Shopify bills merchants on their existing invoice and takes 0% of a developer’s first $1,000,000 in annual gross app revenue. WordPress has no billing rail at all, so every developer assembles checkout, licensing and an update server themselves, and the ecosystem trained buyers on one-time licenses instead of renewals.
Rarely. Only 6.8% of tracked Chrome extension products clear $1,000 per month, with an average of about $347. The structural reason is that Google deprecated Chrome Web Store Payments in September 2020 and never replaced it, so there is no platform billing and the audience is overwhelmingly consumer. Full analysis in the Chrome extension deep dive.
Chrome extensions, at a 4.40x median profit multiple, which is the most misread number in this analysis. That figure is measured across nine surviving businesses, while the 6.8% revenue-reaching rate is measured across everyone who tried. High multiple and low success rate are both true because they describe different populations.
No, and the relationship is close to inverted. Figma has 29 funded companies in our index and 0.0% of tracked independent products clearing $1,000 a month. Notion has 25 funded companies and 3.1%. WordPress has 5 funded companies and 8.3%. Shopify is the only ecosystem where capital and independent success point the same direction.
Not as a business, on this evidence. Zero of the 21 tracked Figma-related products clear $1,000 a month and average revenue is about $20. Notion reaches 3.1%. Both have enthusiastic communities and heavy venture interest, and neither currently converts that into independent developer revenue at a meaningful rate. See oversaturated side hustles for the same pattern elsewhere.
Whether the platform bills for you. The ranking follows billing infrastructure almost exactly: Shopify bills on the merchant invoice and leads at 11.9%, WordPress has no rail and sits at 8.3%, Chrome had its rail removed in 2020 and sits at 6.8%, and the ecosystems with no rail and a prosumer audience sit between 0.0% and 3.1%.
Decisively. Shopify apps sell to merchants and WordPress plugins largely to agencies, and both outperform Chrome extensions, which are more than four to one consumer-facing. Consumer audiences in plugin ecosystems have been trained for over a decade that add-ons are free.
Chrome, by a wide margin. An extension can ship in days with a free listing and no review gauntlet comparable to Shopify’s. That makes it an excellent way to test whether a problem is real, and a poor place to keep the business once it is. See getting to the first $1K MRR.
Shopify takes 15% of gross app revenue and 0% on the first $1,000,000 annually for eligible developers. WordPress.org takes nothing because it provides no billing, though plugin marketplaces can take up to roughly half of a non-exclusive sale. Chrome takes nothing because it removed its payment system in 2020, which sounds generous and costs developers far more than a fee would.
They are close enough that margin is not the deciding factor. WordPress plugin businesses run at an 88.9% median margin, Shopify apps at 85.4%, Chrome extensions at 73.3%. WordPress has the highest margin and the second-lowest multiple, which is the clearest evidence that buyers price durability rather than cost structure. Compare with profit multiples by SaaS category.
Yes, and the acquisition data shows it working. One listing in our dataset is a suite of 20 Shopify apps plus 5 BigCommerce apps sold together. The practical pattern is to win one ecosystem first, then port, because distribution compounds per platform and a thin presence in several is worth less than a strong one in one.
Crowded, not closed. A May 2026 index counted 21,509 public Shopify apps with 2,713 launched in that month alone. The useful signal is review velocity rather than app count: a category with many apps but few new reviews is a trap, while one with active reviews and weak incumbents is still open.
Four things, in order: does the platform bill for you, is the audience a business or a consumer, does the category have documented complaints nobody has answered, and has anyone in that niche actually sold a business. The first two are properties of the platform and the second two are properties of your idea. Our guides to how founders research markets and customer discovery questions cover the second pair.
No. They are base rates across tracked populations, and a base rate says nothing about a specific product. Use them to weight a decision between platforms, not to predict an outcome. Sample sizes range from 6 to 88 products per ecosystem and the smallest should be treated as directional only.
Start with the problem rather than the platform. Search documented complaints for an unmet need, check whether anyone is paying to solve it manually in freelance job data, confirm someone has monetised it by looking at acquisition listings, then pick the ecosystem whose audience owns that problem. Our validation guide walks through it.
Build the Shopify app. It is the only ecosystem in this comparison where an independent developer is more likely to reach a thousand dollars a month than they would be building anything else, it has the largest and most credible exit sample, and the platform handles the part that stops most plugin businesses before they start.
Choose WordPress if you would rather own everything and earn a lower multiple for it, the trade examined in buying versus building and boring industries begging for software. Use Chrome to find out cheaply whether you have a real problem, then move the business somewhere that bills for you.
And treat the capital inversion as the most useful thing on this page. The ecosystems with the most investor enthusiasm have the fewest independents earning a living. Where the money is going and where you can make money are not the same question, and only one of them is yours. A developer nine years into a WordPress plugin business put the cost of learning this late in the plainest possible terms: “the b2b angle and agency licenses is where the real money is. i see that now. i just didnt see it when i was 9 years deep in b2c selling $39 licenses to individuals one at a time.” — r/Wordpress
Start with the complaint data, check it against what has actually sold, and pick the platform last. If you are still choosing what to build, micro SaaS ideas backed by complaints and finding problems worth solving are the next reads.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). Shopify App vs WordPress Plugin: Which Pays Best in 2026. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/shopify-app-vs-wordpress-plugin