Awesome Motive Acquires Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, and WP Simple Pay, to Expand Digital Commerce Offerings

Today, I’m extremely excited to share that all Sandhills Development products are joining Awesome Motive.

This includes several popular WordPress plugins including Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay, Sugar Calendar, and many more.

These brands are very close to my heart because when I first started selling premium plugins in 2013, we used Easy Digital Downloads, and we still use EDD to power our eCommerce.

This is one of those rare life moments where things have come full circle, and I honestly feel like I’m living in a dream.

Introduction – Quick Overview of the Plugins

Unlike our other investments, this is an acquisition of a large portfolio of plugins, so I’ll give a quick overview of what each of them do.

Easy Digital Downloads makes it easy for you to sell digital products online such as eBooks, digital art, premium software, and just about any type of digital files.

We use EDD to manage and sell our popular premium plugins because it makes it easy for us to collect recurring subscription payments on our website, manage software licensing, protect premium file access (so only members can access it), and more.

AffiliateWP is the leading affiliate management software for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and other popular WordPress platforms. Simply put, it makes it easy for you to launch an affiliate program for your online store.

WP Simple Pay is a Stripe payment plugin that makes it easy for you to accept one-time or recurring payments on your website without setting up a shopping cart. It comes with a payment form builder and all the tools for you to securely accept payments on your site.

Sugar Calendar is a simple events calendar plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to do event management, ticketing, and everything you need to manage / run an event. It also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, Stripe, and other solutions so you can sell event tickets and accept payments on your site.

Aside from that, as part of this deal, we’re also acquiring several free open source plugins such as the popular Transients Manager plugin that’s very helpful in debugging WordPress errors.

And most importantly, the entire team is also joining Awesome Motive, and we’re extremely excited because there are so many talented individuals that I have always admired for years who I’ll now get to work with on a daily basis.

Background Story

In 2013, when I launched OptinMonster, I needed a solution that made it easy for me to sell the premium plugin (digital download), restrict access & updates to only paying members, and most importantly accept recurring payments.

We ended up using Easy Digital Downloads because it helped us do all of that and more.

As we built more premium plugins like MonsterInsights, WPForms, etc they all used EDD.

Even the popular WordPress plugins we later acquired / invested in through the WPBeginner Growth Fund like Smash Balloon, SearchWP, Uncanny Automator, Formidable Forms, etc all used Easy Digital Downloads.

I can easily say that after WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads has a single largest impact on my online success.

This is why it has always had a special place in my heart.

Over the years, I became good friends with EDD / Sandhills Development founder, Pippin Williamson.

We first talked about joining forces back in 2015, but the timing wasn’t right.

After our acquisition of SearchWP in July, Pippin reached out, and we restarted the conversation.

After a few calls, we agreed that Awesome Motive will be the perfect home for Easy Digital Downloads and other Sandhills products given our vast experience in the WordPress industry.

I’m truly honored to have this opportunity to serve over 100,000+ users who use Sandhills Products to grow their online business.

What’s Coming Next?

Our work is just starting.

We will be leveraging the scale and knowledge of the Awesome Motive team to build more innovative solutions to help you grow your online business.

We have built a lot of internal tools to grow our eCommerce / digital product business that I’m really looking forward to sharing with the WordPress community.

We will be combining my vision + the vast knowledge of the Sandhills team to bring even more powerful features to you.

If you have suggestions on features you’d like to see in EDD, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay, or any of Sandhills plugin, then please let us know by sending us a message via WPBeginner contact form.

As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner. We look forward to bringing you more amazing solutions to help you grow your business.

Yours Truly,

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

P.S. Want to join our team and work alongside me in helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys? We’re hiring.

We’re a fully remote team of over 200+ amazingly talented team members across 36 countries.