A few days ago we shared our latest plugin with the world: Boxzilla.

Boxzilla is the successor of Scroll Triggered Boxes, a plugin allowing you to create content boxes which can pop-up or slide-in at various trigger points. Scroll Triggered Boxes was very well received by the WordPress community, with over 125.000 downloads, 15.000 active sites and nearly 100 five-star reviews (zero bad ones).

However, we felt the name "Scroll Triggered Boxes" didn't do justice to the plugin anymore, since it evolved far beyond allowing just a scroll trigger.

That's why we came up with a new name, introduced several new features and got serious about introducing a Premium plan so the plugin could start sustaining itself.

Right now the only reason we're able to really spend time on the plugin is because of the success of MailChimp for WordPress (which recently crossed the 500.000 active sites mark). We're hoping to improve that with these changes and the introduction of the exit intent add-on.

Boxzilla.js

We started working on decoupling the actual trigger logic from the plugin itself so that it can be used outside of WordPress. The result of that effort is open-sourced as Boxzilla.js — have a play with it!

Technology stack

In order to start selling Premium plans to our users, we decided to try something new.

We've been using Easy Digital Downloads for over 3 years now and although it was super easy to get started with, we've been feeling rather held back by it lately.

Therefore, we built a custom solution on top of Laravel (a PHP framework), Stripe (for payments) and MoneyBird (Dutch accounting software).

To deal with Europe's crazy VAT laws, we wrote some more code which we've open sourced as well: Laravel VAT.

Most content pages on Boxzilla's website are handled using Jekyll, a static site generator, which has been an absolute joy to work with.

Monthly payments

We started offering monthly payments (next to the yearly option). Interestingly enough, over 50% of people that bought a Boxzilla license in the last few days still chose to pay yearly, even though we default to the monthly option. You get 2 free months a year if you pay up front, by the way.

I guess only time will tell if monthly payments are really worth it - we realise it's something rather new in WordPress-land and some even see it as a huge risk. :)

If you have any questions about any of these changes, our set-up or anything related to what we do, feel free to ask away!