Elliot Sowersby is a solo WordPress developer from Yorkshire who started building Coupon Affiliates around 2015. The plugin lets WooCommerce store owners run an affiliate program built around discount coupon codes, so affiliates get credit when their code is used at checkout. For its first three years it earned essentially no revenue, and only in years four and five did it start to bring in a small but steady amount.

The turning point came in 2021, when growth picked up sharply and kept compounding each year. Elliot lists Coupon Affiliates on the WordPress.org directory with a free tier, which feeds discovery, then converts a share of users to paid licenses. He runs the same playbook across a portfolio of plugins: two of his free plugins, Simple Cloudflare Turnstile and reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce, have passed 100,000 and 40,000 active installs, and their setup guide posts pull in steady organic traffic that points back to his paid work.

By 2025 the plugin side had grown enough that Elliot made a structural change to his business, RelyWP. He had long mixed client work like hosting, care plans, and site builds with plugin sales. Because plugins had grown to over 90% of total revenue, up from under 10% five years earlier, he stopped taking new service clients and moved existing care-plan customers to other providers so he could work on plugins alone.

Elliot is candid that the headline 2025 numbers are growth rates, not absolute revenue. Coupon Affiliates revenue grew about 11% on the year, MRR grew 6.4%, and churn dropped 9%, while roughly 3.7% of revenue was lost to refunds and chargebacks. He shipped 42 updates and handled more than 1,000 support tickets across the year, an average of about 2.7 a day, all as a one-person operation.

The throughline of his ten-year retrospective is patience. The first three years looked like a failure on paper, but the same plugin is now his main income and the reason he could go all-in on products. With the time freed up by dropping services, he launched a new WooCommerce loyalty plugin, Simple Points and Rewards, where 30% to 40% of early sales came from existing customers who heard about it through his newsletter.