CodeForge — Theme, Plugin & Script Business Command Center

Sold once. Supported forever.

CodeForge is a complete, private, 100% offline operating system for a software product business — themes, plugins, scripts, component libraries, extensions and starter kits. 15 integrated modules and 39 tools in a single HTML file, plus a live 11-sheet Excel workbook. Nothing installs. No account. No product, price, ticket or customer ever leaves your computer.

A licence sold today still owes you work

Every person who has ever sold a theme or a plugin knows that sentence is true. CodeForge is what happens when you make it a number.

In the worked example inside — six products, thirty months of ledger, 2,630 licences in the last year — a licence owes 21 minutes of support, and only 8 of those arrive in the first month. The other 64% turns up over the years that follow. On an average sale that is 39% of everything you were paid, gone before you have finished honouring it.

And it is not a decay

This is the part nobody models. Support is not driven by how long ago somebody bought — it is driven by when WordPress, PHP and Node ship. When a platform releases, every cohort files a ticket in the same fortnight, whether they bought last week or two years ago. The curve goes back UP in eleven of the twenty-one months solid enough to judge.

It is built the honest way, too: month m is measured only against licences old enough to have lived through month m. A licence sold last month has not failed to file a month-twenty ticket — it has not had the chance, and counting it in the denominator is the most common way this figure gets flattered. Nothing is extrapolated past where the ledger stops.

The marketplace cut, and the part that costs more

Half of every sale is the obvious cost. The expensive one is quieter: buyers you can email renew at 47% and buyers you cannot renew at 9%. Same files, same price. What differs is whether anybody was able to tell them their year was ending — and that gap repeats every year, forever.

The lifetime deal, priced before you sign it

812 licences at $49 through a bundle site taking 70%. It brought in $11,936, and by month 10 the support on that cohort had eaten all of it. They will never pay again, because that is what lifetime means. CodeForge finds that month from your own ticket ledger rather than from a rule of thumb.

Twenty-one screens

The catalogue — Product Register · The Support Tail (the flagship) · The Update Treadmill, a fixed cost recovered only from new sales and therefore rising as sales fall · The Compatibility Matrix, where over half the release year existed only because something underneath changed.

Licensing — Licence Tiers, where the same support cost comes out of every tier · Renewals & Lapses · Refunds & Chargebacks, including the support spent before the money went back · What A Licence Is Worth, with a price rise priced on revenue AND on margin, because they are not the same and the usual figure is the wrong one.

Selling it — The Marketplace Cut · Selling It Yourself · Free Users, with a break-even conversion rate that needs no guess · Lifetime Deals & Bundles.

The work — The Ticket Ledger, sorted by what would have prevented each one rather than by product · Technical Debt, with published end-of-life dates · What The Backlog Costs, ranked by votes an hour and priced in weeks · Who Buys Them, measuring which kind of buyer actually files the tickets.

Eight calculators

The support tail of one sale · The marketplace cut · What a renewal is worth · Dropping a version · The free tier · A lifetime deal · A price rise · What the backlog costs. Every one opens with your own figures already in it, and there is a button on each tab to reload them.

Twelve copy-ready pieces

The first reply that halves the thread · it is not our bug, said without being unhelpful · the customisation boundary · the release note people actually read · dropping an old platform version · the security release · the renewal reminder that gets opened · the refund given quickly · a price rise · their licence expired and they are still asking · somebody running a single-site licence on forty sites, written on the assumption it was an accident · turning down a feature request without losing them.

What you get

• CodeForge-Theme-Plugin-Script-Business-Command-Center.html — the whole application, one file, offline
• CodeForge-Companion-Workbook.xlsx — 11 live formula-driven sheets
• Quick-Start-Guide.html — eight steps to your first real number
• How-To-Use-Guide.html — the full manual, screen by screen
• README.txt and LICENSE.txt

Genuinely private. It makes no network requests of any kind. Your products, prices, tickets and customers stay in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere.

Honest by design. The support curve is never continued past the months your data covers, so everything built on it is stated as a floor. The backlog carries no revenue column, because what a feature would earn is not knowable from anything you hold. Rises in the curve are counted as a direction rather than against a tuned threshold, and months with too few licences behind them are excluded from every conclusion rather than quietly included. Money with a cause, money that depends on a target, and work already owed are three separate lists with three separate totals. And the headline is a rate rather than a profit, because the hours are mostly your own and subtracting your own time from your own revenue produces a number that means nothing.

CodeForge performs arithmetic on figures you supply. It is not legal, tax, accounting or contractual advice. Marketplace terms, end-user licence agreements, open-source obligations and what a commitment described as “lifetime” actually binds you to are matters to take proper advice on rather than to settle from a template.