Jason Leow did not set out to build a business around Carrd. He set out to finally learn to code.

In 2019 he tried again, for what he calls the nth time, with Vue.js. Online classes had failed him before, so he changed the method: build micro standalone apps that could be finished inside a week. Vue suited that, because a small app compiles into something embeddable anywhere. To show the work, he embedded each one in a Carrd page, mostly as a record of what he had learned that week.

Then the idea arrived sideways. Carrd is deliberately constrained, a one page site builder that does a narrow thing very well. His practice apps happened to fill exactly the gaps those constraints left open. In his own words it was "totally by accident. A happy accident."

He put out the first few plugins for free. An accordion dropdown menu got popular. A pricing table followed. There was no store and no delivery system, so for the first few months he cloned each Carrd site by hand and transferred it to whoever asked. He describes that period as painful and time consuming. Carrd's own Seller Program arrived soon after and fixed it, because buyers could then download a site as a template directly.

The dates here are anchored on what Leow states himself. He says Plugins For Carrd launched in December 2020 and that his first paid plugin went out in March 2021, so the counts below run from 1 December 2020. That is about ninety days of giving things away before charging for anything, and the first paid plugin was not a guess. It was the feature people asked for most in his conversations with them, a nav menu bar that stayed usable on mobile.

March 2021 brought $30. So did May and June. April was the first month past $100, at $105. The whole first year came to $1,099, an average of $91.60 a month, with January and February at zero. These are one off sales, not subscriptions, so read the monthly figures as months when plugin sales crossed a line rather than as recurring revenue.

What makes the first year interesting is how little was done to produce it. "What's surprising about the revenue was how little I did to market it," he wrote. "I shared bits and pieces on social media, answered some questions, that's about it. It just kept growing all on its own."

Year two roughly tripled it: $3,372 across 2022, averaging $281 a month, with a $607 November and a $515 December. By November 2022 he could line Plugins For Carrd up against every other product he ran, including Lifelog, the daily writing platform he had marketed far harder. Every month except February had out earned it. That comparison is what moved Plugins to his main project and pushed Lifelog to a side project.

He also had a second income stream he initially ignored. Carrd runs a Referral Program and a Seller Program, and the small amounts accumulating there turned out to matter. By early 2023 he had withdrawn about $2,000 that had piled up over two years without him tracking it. He admits his accounting was sloppy.

The marketing that did eventually happen looks nothing like a growth playbook. He listed what he thought was working: answering new customers within a day, helping people with their Carrd problems without expecting anything back, releasing more free templates and plugins, and adding "~ plugins.carrd.co" to his username and sign offs so a link travelled with every helpful comment. His own summary: "Just old school good service. Just being giving to a fault. No growth hacks. No fancy tricks."

Later he got more deliberate. By late 2023 he was launching a new plugin every month, distributing each launch to twenty or thirty Carrd related channels at a time, reinvesting revenue into sponsorship spots on other people's Carrd template sites and courses, running an annual Black Friday sale, and collaborating on a bundle with another Carrd seller. He also built a Black Friday directory of Carrd deals in two hours and pushed it to thirty two channels.

The compounding shows up in what the ecosystem became worth to him rather than in plugin sales alone. In December 2024 he sold 23 plugins for $442, took $1,604 in Carrd affiliate income, and earned $1,500 managing Carrd's X account, which he tallied as $3,546 from Carrd that month. From January 2025 he started doing technical support for Carrd itself at $50 an hour. Four years of being useful to one small platform turned into product income, affiliate income and contract work from the same source.

He is honest about the ceiling. His 2025 goal was $10,000 a month in product revenue and he missed it badly, writing about burnout, a young family and a season of life that did not match the goal. Plugins For Carrd never became a large business. What it did was earn more, with less effort, than products he pushed much harder.

The clearest lesson is the one he named himself. This is a sell your sawdust business. The plugins were a by product of learning to code, and the by product outlasted the intent.