Seven lessons, seven real decisions: whether your plugin is actually ready for a stranger to install, how to price an AI feature honestly, how to license and enforce that price, how to stay GPL-compliant while doing it, where to launch, and how to support a product that fails less predictably than most. This closing lesson pulls all of it into one checklist you can run against your own product before you actually ship it, and closes out the full eighteen-course track this lesson is the last stop on.
This lesson assumes you’ve worked through all seven prior lessons in this course. It’s a synthesis, not new material, use it as the final checklist before you actually launch.
Step 1: The full go-to-market checklist
Step 2: Why the order matters
These decisions aren’t independent. Pricing (Lesson 2) determines what your license system (Lesson 3) actually needs to enforce, whether that’s a per-call meter, a credit balance, or a simple site activation count. Licensing and GPL compliance (Lessons 3 and 4) determine what your launch funnel (Lesson 5) is even allowed to do on WordPress.org, and whether a channel outside it (Lesson 6) makes more sense for your specific product. And every decision upstream of launch shapes what your support team (Lesson 7) will actually spend its time explaining. Working through them in this order, rather than picking a launch channel first and retrofitting pricing and licensing to fit it, avoids rebuilding foundational decisions after they’re already public.
It’s tempting to pick WordPress.org first because it’s familiar, then figure out pricing afterward. If your product doesn’t actually have a genuine free tier to offer, that choice locks you into either building one you don’t need or awkwardly retrofitting a funnel around a product that was never meant to be free. Decide pricing and licensing first, then let the channel follow from that, not the other way around.
Step 3: What “done” looks like
You’re ready to launch when every item in Step 1’s checklist is checked honestly, not aspirationally. A missing item isn’t a reason to delay indefinitely, some of this (support volume, real customer-reported edge cases) only becomes clear after real customers exist. But every item should be a deliberate decision you made, not a gap you haven’t noticed yet.
Recap: the full track, start to finish
This course started by turning Course 8’s single closing lesson into a full business track: productizing what you built, pricing it honestly, licensing and staying GPL-compliant, launching on WordPress.org or elsewhere, and supporting an AI product for what it actually is. That’s the last piece of a track that began with WordPress AI Foundations, the entry point that laid out the Abilities API, MCP, the MCP Adapter, and the PHP AI Client SDK before anything else in the track built on it, through Advanced WordPress MCP Architecture & Enterprise AI, the capstone that took a single working integration to a production-grade, publishable plugin, and now to this course, where that plugin becomes an actual business with a real go-to-market plan behind it.
That’s the complete eighteen-course track: from what an ability is, to a registered MCP server, to connected AI clients, to real security and authentication, to calling AI providers from your own code, to shipped editorial and store projects, to a production-grade architecture, and now to a saleable product with pricing, licensing, a launch plan, and a support practice built for what an AI product actually is. There isn’t a Course 19. This is the end of the track, and if you’ve built the product this course assumed you have, it’s ready for someone other than you to use it.
Resources & further reading
- WordPress AI Foundations, this track, the starting point
- Advanced WordPress MCP Architecture & Enterprise AI, this track, Course 8 and the technical foundation this course builds on