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Plugin Rank sold a USD 119/month plan to WordPress plugin developers. On 1 September 2026 its domain returns no DNS record at all. Awesome Motive, the company that bought it, no longer lists it among the roughly 40 brands on its own brands page.
Quick answer: Don’t sign up. Plugin Rank is unreachable and there’s no announced replacement. The closest working substitute is PluginTracker.io, free for one plugin and USD 48/year for ten. Want to know what your installs actually run, not just where you rank? PluginTracker.dev costs USD 119.88/year for one plugin. Authors tracking one plugin on no budget can pull the same raw numbers from the WordPress.org API for nothing.
Last reviewed: September 2026. Domain status, pricing and directory figures verified on 1 September 2026.
What We Checked, and How
The starting point was a dead page. The first job was proving it was dead, not just briefly broken. We queried pluginrank.com against three separate resolvers: the local system resolver, Google Public DNS and Cloudflare’s. All three returned the same failure, and Cloudflare named it precisely: “No Reachable Authority at delegation pluginrank.com.” The .com registry still delegates the domain to two GoDaddy parking nameservers, and both refuse queries for the zone. That’s a server-side fault visible to every visitor on the internet, not a local network problem.
From there we rebuilt the timeline from records that outlive a website. A whois lookup gave the registrar and the dates the record changed. The Internet Archive gave the last date anything on the site was successfully crawled. The last archived copy of the pricing page gave the figures quoted below. That’s why every Plugin Rank price here carries the date of the snapshot it came from, rather than a claim about today.
Directory figures come from the WordPress.org plugin API, queried directly on 1 September 2026, not from any tracker’s marketing page. Pricing for the alternatives came from each service’s own live pricing page on the same day. Two limits worth stating. We hold no paid account with any tracker here, so nothing below reviews the logged-in product. And we could not verify wpMetrics pricing at all, because the service doesn’t publish it.
Plugin Rank Went Dark Somewhere Between June and September 2026
Here’s the sequence, as far as the public record allows.
Iain Poulson built Plugin Rank during the 2020 lockdowns and sold it inside a year. Awesome Motive announced its acquisition of Plugin Rank on 8 June 2021. The product then kept running under new ownership for close to five more years. The Internet Archive’s copy from 7 March 2026 shows an ordinary, working site. Pricing, login, feature tour, and customer quotes from Elliot Condon of Advanced Custom Fields and Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains. Nothing about it reads like a product winding down.
The last time the Archive successfully fetched anything from the domain was 16 June 2026, and those were stylesheets and scripts rather than pages. After that, silence. The whois record for pluginrank.com was last modified on 24 July 2026. The domain now points at ns1 and ns2.renewyourname.net (a hostname that isn’t subtle about what it means). Those are the nameservers GoDaddy assigns to parked and lapsed domains. Registry expiry is still 12 June 2027, so this isn’t a domain anyone has lost outright.
What we could not find, despite searching for it: any announcement. No sunset post, no migration notice, no “Plugin Rank is joining X” page. Awesome Motive’s brands page listed about 40 products when we loaded it on 1 September 2026. The list runs from WPForms and MonsterInsights down to smaller acquisitions like Beacon and LedgerPort. Plugin Rank isn’t on it. Draw the obvious conclusion carefully. Absence from a marketing page plus a broken delegation is strong evidence the product is finished. It isn’t a company statement, though, and we won’t pretend it is.
For anyone still holding a subscription, the practical advice is short. Check your card statement for a recurring charge from Awesome Motive. Cancel it through your bank or the original receipt email, because there’s no dashboard left to cancel from.
What Plugin Rank Cost While It Was Running
These are the figures from the last archived copy of the pricing page, captured 17 January 2026. Treat them as a historical record, not a live quote.
- Starter, USD 9/month or USD 90/year: 1 plugin, up to 10 keywords, email reports, competitor analysis
- Plus, USD 49/month or USD 490/year: up to 5 plugins, up to 50 keywords, plus competitor tracking and language search
- Pro, USD 119/month or USD 1,190/year: up to 20 plugins, up to 500 keywords, same feature set as Plus
Every tier ran on a 7-day trial that required a card and converted automatically. Billing was in US dollars, and the refund policy was a single month: unhappy inside the first paid month and they’d cancel and refund you. Annual billing was priced at ten months for twelve, so paying monthly cost exactly 20% more across all three tiers. On Pro that gap was USD 238 a year.
The pricing tells you who the product was built for. One plugin and ten keywords for USD 90 a year is hobby pricing. Twenty plugins and 500 keywords for USD 1,190 is a plugin shop with a portfolio and a marketing budget. There was nothing in between Starter and Plus. An author with two plugins jumped from USD 90 to USD 490 a year, a 5.4x increase for one extra plugin slot. That gap is the single clearest structural weakness in the product’s pricing, and it’s the gap every replacement below now competes in.
Why Plugin Authors Pay for This Data at All
This part is worth understanding before you shop, because it explains why the surviving tools all look slightly odd.
The WordPress.org plugin directory is a real acquisition channel. We queried its API on 1 September 2026 and counted 67,113 plugins. That’s 7,000 more than the “60,000+” figure most tracking services still advertise on their homepages. Competition inside it is brutal in the categories that matter. The directory’s own search returns 7,713 results for “seo”, 7,694 for “cache” and 7,556 for “contact form”. Ranking on page one of those searches is worth real installs.
So how much does WordPress.org tell authors about their own performance? Almost nothing. Active install counts are rounded to one significant figure. A plugin can sit on “20,000+” for four months while gaining 3,000 users, and its author sees a flat number the whole time. It got worse in 2022. On 2 October 2022 WordPress.org removed the active-install growth chart from plugin pages and disabled the API that fed it. The meta team cited insufficient data obfuscation. Poulson had already sold Plugin Rank by then, and called the removal symptomatic of freemium developers being treated as second-class citizens without basic business data. That decision is why every paid tracker here now estimates install movement instead of reporting it.
Your readme file is the other constraint. WordPress.org’s official plugin handbook allows “1 to 5 comma separated terms” as tags, and forbids using a competitor’s plugin name. Five tags, 67,113 plugins. Picking the wrong five is expensive. Knowing whether a change to those five moved your position is the one thing the directory won’t show you. That’s the job these tools exist to do.
PluginTracker.io – Best for authors who want rank tracking to cost almost nothing
Free tier available. Premium USD 4.99/month, or USD 3.99/month billed annually at USD 48/year. Up to 10 plugins, 200 keywords.
USD 48 a year. That’s PluginTracker.io Premium billed annually, for ten plugins and 200 keyword slots. Plugin Rank charged USD 490 a year for five plugins and 50 keywords. Same category of product, 90% less money, twice the plugins and four times the keywords. If that sounds too good, it partly is, and we’ll get to why.
The free tier is the headline for most readers. One plugin, three keywords, 14 days of rank history, in-app notifications only. No card. For an author with a single plugin who wants to know whether last month’s readme rewrite moved anything, that’s enough to answer the question. Plugin Rank never had a free tier at all, so the entry point here is not 90% cheaper, it’s infinitely cheaper.
Premium adds the things you’d actually renew for. Rank history stretches to 180 days. You also get competitor tracking with automatic detection, keyword gap analysis, CSV and Excel export, and a five-category SEO score on your readme. The service says it tracks 60,000+ plugins daily and computes a global rank across all of them. WordPress.org has never published that metric in any form. There’s a set of AI features layered on top, seven tools refreshed once a day, covering readme suggestions, review clustering and FAQ generation.
Now the caution, and it’s a real one. The domain was registered on 2 July 2025, which makes this service about 14 months old, and it transferred registrars in June 2026. Its About page names no founder, no team and no company. Read the marketing closely and it doesn’t always agree with itself. That same About page promises “unlimited ranking history”, while the pricing table caps Premium at 180 days. The homepage comparison table targets “PluginRank” at USD 49 to USD 119 a month, quietly omitting the USD 9 Starter tier Plugin Rank also sold. The claimed 10,000+ developers can’t be checked from outside either. You’re buying from an anonymous young company at a price that leaves little room for a support team.
Pros
- Free tier with no card required, indefinitely
- USD 48/year for 10 plugins undercuts every paid rival here
- Global rank across the whole directory, which WordPress.org doesn’t publish
- CSV and Excel export, so your history survives the service
Cons
- Domain is only 14 months old, and the About page names nobody
- Claims unlimited history, sells a 180-day cap
- Marketing compares against a competitor that no longer exists
- Free tier caps history at 14 days, too short to judge a readme change
Pricing: Free forever on Basic. Premium is USD 4.99 monthly or USD 48 billed yearly, so paying month to month costs USD 59.88 a year, 25% more than committing. A 7-day trial and a 14-day money-back window both apply to Premium. Enterprise is quote-only for up to 50 plugins and a full year of history.
Best for: Solo authors and small plugin shops who want daily rank data without a line item anyone has to approve.
Skip if: You need a named, accountable vendor standing behind your reporting.
Verdict: Start here, on the free tier, today. For an author with one to ten plugins this is the direct Plugin Rank replacement. USD 48 a year is close enough to free that the young-company risk is affordable. If you need install-level numbers rather than positions, PluginTracker.dev does that and this doesn’t. Need a vendor you can point a finance team at? None of the survivors qualify, so read the WordPress.org API section instead.
PluginTracker.dev – Best for authors who need install numbers, not just positions
USD 14.99/month, or USD 9.99/month billed annually, for one plugin. 14-day trial, no card.
Start with the bad news: this is the most expensive option on the page, and it refuses refunds outright. The 14-day trial is the evaluation period, and once you’ve paid, cancelling stops the next charge and nothing more. Plugin Rank, for all its faults, would refund your first month.
What you’re paying for is a different product underneath. Where every other tracker reads the same public directory data, PluginTracker.dev pairs it with an optional telemetry SDK you ship inside your plugin. Users opt in, and you choose which fields to collect. What you get back is what WordPress.org never asks: which PHP and WordPress versions your installs run, which release they’re on, and why people deactivate. That’s the answer to the October 2022 data removal that no amount of clever estimation gives you. The daily install estimate sits alongside it, moving inside the rounded bucket the directory shows.
The rest is broad. Nineteen features sit across four groups. They cover daily install and download history, directory ranking, rating and review tracking, and support ticket monitoring. Then come threshold alerts on one-star reviews, weekly digests, monthly reports, goal tracking, a public plugin profile and embeddable badges. The AI tools draft review replies and support responses rather than generating marketing copy, which is a more honest use of the technology than most.
On price it lands between the two extremes. The 5-plugin tier at USD 19.99/month annual works out to USD 239.88 a year for five plugins and 50 keywords. Plugin Rank Plus charged USD 490 for exactly the same limits. Half the price for like-for-like capacity, plus telemetry Plugin Rank never had. Set against PluginTracker.io, though, the gap runs the other way: USD 239.88 for 5 plugins versus USD 48 for 10. You’re paying five times as much for half the plugin slots, and telemetry is what you’re buying with the difference.
Pros
- Opt-in telemetry SDK reports real PHP and WordPress versions
- 14-day trial, no card, so evaluation costs nothing
- Same-day alerts on one-star reviews and install drops
- Half the price of Plugin Rank Plus at identical limits
Cons
- No refunds once a subscription starts
- Keyword allowance is 10 per plugin, low against rivals
- Telemetry means shipping an SDK inside your plugin
- Only 900+ plugins tracked, a small dataset for competitor benchmarks
Pricing: Three tiers, priced by plugin count. One plugin is USD 14.99 monthly or USD 9.99 annual (USD 119.88/year). Five plugins are USD 29.99 or USD 19.99 (USD 239.88/year). Ten plugins are USD 74.99 or USD 49.99 (USD 599.88/year). Monthly billing costs 50% more than annual on every tier, the steepest monthly penalty here. Lifetime deals existed once and are no longer sold, though existing holders keep access.
Best for: Commercial plugin authors with a freemium funnel, where knowing why users deactivate is worth more than the subscription.
Skip if: You only want to know where you rank for ten keywords.
Verdict: Buy this if telemetry is the point, because nothing else here can tell you what your installs actually run. Buy it on the annual plan or not at all, since monthly costs 50% more and there’s no refund to fall back on. If keyword positions are all you need, PluginTracker.io does that for USD 48 a year instead of USD 119.88. Take the cheaper tool.
wpMetrics – Best for nobody, until it publishes a price
Pricing not published. Annual plans exist. Last public changelog entry: 2 October 2022.
wpMetrics is the oldest survivor in this category and the hardest to recommend, which is a shame, because the product design is sound. It reads the official WordPress.org API and requires no code changes to your plugin. Coverage runs to downloads history, actual active installs, keyword rankings, review insights, competitor dashboards and email reports on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle. That’s the Plugin Rank feature list plus reviews, from a service that predates it.
Two things stop us pointing readers at it. The first is pricing. There is no public pricing page. The URL where one would live returns a 403, and the marketing site sends you to a signup form instead. A changelog entry confirms annual plans exist and save you one month against monthly billing, but the actual numbers are behind account creation. Every other tool here publishes its prices, and a service that won’t is asking for your email before it will tell you what it charges.
The second is maintenance. The public changelog’s most recent entry is dated 2 October 2022, and its subject is WordPress.org killing the active install growth API. The developer wrote at the time that the active installs view would be “less informative” without that data. Calculating actual installs would no longer be possible either, and they hoped the meta team would reverse the change. The meta team never did. Nearly four years later, nothing further has been published. The app still loads, so this isn’t dead in the sense that Plugin Rank is dead. It is a service whose core metric was broken by an upstream change it publicly said it couldn’t work around.
Set that against the alternatives numerically. PluginTracker.io has shipped a global ranking system, seven AI tools and CSV export in the 14 months since its domain was registered in July 2025. wpMetrics has published nothing in 47 months. Whatever the internal reality, the visible development gap between the two is not close.
Pros
- Uses the official WordPress.org API, no SDK in your plugin
- Covers keywords, reviews, competitors and support threads in one dashboard
- Longest history in the category
Cons
- No published pricing anywhere on the site
- Public changelog silent since October 2022
- Its own developer said the 2022 API change broke actual install calculation
Pricing: Not disclosed publicly. Annual billing is described as one month free against monthly. We could not verify a single figure this session, so no number appears here.
Best for: Existing wpMetrics subscribers who already know what they pay and are happy.
Skip if: You’re choosing a tracker today.
Verdict: New buyers should pick PluginTracker.io instead, which publishes its price and has shipped visible work this year. Existing subscribers with a working dashboard have no urgent reason to move. Export what history you can anyway, because the pattern that just erased Plugin Rank starts exactly like this. Anyone who needs a vendor answer before paying will not get one here.
WP.MD – Best for competitor and market research, free
Free. No account. Daily rankings across themes, plugins and authors.
WP.MD isn’t a rank tracker, and treating it as one will disappoint you. It won’t watch your keywords, email you when a review lands, or remember that you exist. It ranks the plugins most sites end up installing, not yours. What it does is publish the directory’s whole popularity picture, updated daily, at no cost and behind no signup. That means most popular plugins and themes with 1, 7 and 30-day movement, install milestones, an author leaderboard, and premium plugin rankings by real-world usage.
That’s genuinely useful for a job the paid tools handle worse. Before you pick your five readme tags, you want to know who already owns those searches and how far ahead they are. WP.MD will tell you that Elementor, Yoast SEO and Contact Form 7 all sit in the 10M+ bucket. Classic Editor holds 8M+ and LiteSpeed Cache 7M+. It also shows Syed Balkhi leading the author leaderboard with 21.6M+ installs against Automattic’s 18.4M+. Ten minutes there beats a month of paid tracking, if the question is which category you can realistically win.
Where it stops is personal data. There’s no per-plugin keyword position, no history for your plugin specifically, no alerts. Put the two free options side by side and the split is clean. PluginTracker.io’s free tier tracks 3 keywords on 1 plugin, with 14 days of history. WP.MD tracks 0 of your keywords and all 67,113 plugins in the directory. One watches you, the other watches the market. Use both. They cost the same.
Pros
- Free, no account, no card, no email
- Daily movement across the full directory
- Author leaderboard shows who really owns a category
Cons
- No keyword tracking for your own plugin
- No alerts, no history you can act on
Pricing: Free, with nothing to renew.
Best for: Sizing up a category before you commit five readme tags to it.
Skip if: You want to know your own position on Tuesday versus Monday.
Verdict: Bookmark it and pair it with something else, because it answers a different question than the trackers do. For competitor research it beats every paid tool here on price and breadth. For tracking your own plugin it does nothing at all, and PluginTracker.io’s free tier is the piece you add next to it.
The WordPress.org Plugin API – Best for authors who can write 20 lines of code
Free. Public. No key, no account, no rate limit published.
If you have one plugin and a spare afternoon, you don’t need any of the above. Everything the paid trackers read is available to you directly, and it’s the same endpoint they call.
A single request to api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/ returns your plugin’s active installs, download count, rating, review count, version, last-updated date and tested-up-to version as JSON. Pass a search term instead and you get the directory’s ranked results for that query. That’s your keyword position, straight from the source that decides it. Every directory figure on this page came from exactly that. A handful of requests told us the directory holds 67,113 plugins and that “seo” returns 7,713 results. The same endpoint showed 9 of the 300 most popular plugins have gone over a year without an update.
Store the response in a table once a day and you’ve rebuilt the core of a USD 90/year Plugin Rank Starter plan. Total cost: a cron job. What you don’t get is the work around the data. No charts, no email digests, no competitor detection, no alerts, and no history for the days before you started collecting. That last one matters more than developers expect. The whole value of rank tracking is the six months of history you didn’t know you’d need. A script you write today starts at zero, same as a subscription you buy today.
Pros
- Free and public, no key or account
- Same source every paid tracker reads
- Your data stays yours and outlives any vendor
Cons
- You build the charts, alerts and storage yourself
- No historical backfill before your first run
Pricing: Free. Your only cost is somewhere to run a daily job.
Best for: Developers with one or two plugins who’d rather own the pipeline than rent it.
Skip if: You want alerts and reports without maintaining anything.
Verdict: Take this route if you have more time than budget and a portfolio small enough that a spreadsheet handles it. Once you’re past four or five plugins, the reporting you’d have to build costs more hours than PluginTracker.io’s USD 48 a year costs money. Just buy the tool. Anyone who needs deactivation reasons has to go to PluginTracker.dev regardless, because the public API has never carried that.
How to Choose a Plugin Rank Tracker Now
Plugin Rank’s collapse should change how you shop for the replacement. Pick on export and price, and assume the vendor might not be here in three years.
Budget: nothing at all, one plugin. Run PluginTracker.io’s free tier for your three most important keywords, and use WP.MD alongside it for the competitive picture. Don’t pay anyone yet. Fourteen days of history is thin, but it costs zero and tells you whether a readme change moved anything within a fortnight.
Portfolio: two to ten plugins. You run free plugins with a freemium upsell. PluginTracker.io Premium at USD 48/year. This is the exact gap Plugin Rank priced badly, where two plugins meant jumping from USD 90 to USD 490 a year. Skip PluginTracker.dev at this size unless you’re shipping an SDK, because USD 239.88 a year buys you five plugin slots against ten.
Workload: deactivation is the metric. You sell a commercial plugin, and churn is the number you chase. PluginTracker.dev, annual billing, USD 119.88/year for one plugin. Nothing else here answers why users turned your plugin off, and for a paid product that answer is worth more than the whole subscription. Pay annually: monthly is 50% more, and there’s no refund if you change your mind.
Audience: 20+ plugins. You’re an agency or a plugin shop. No good option exists at that scale today. Plugin Rank Pro covered 20 plugins for USD 1,190/year and is gone; PluginTracker.io’s Enterprise tier is quote-only; PluginTracker.dev tops out at ten. Get a quote from PluginTracker.io, and build the WordPress.org API job as your backup so a second vendor collapse doesn’t erase your history.
One rule regardless of which you pick. Export your data monthly, to CSV, somewhere you control. PluginTracker.io includes export on Premium. If a tracker won’t let you take your history out, that history belongs to the vendor. Vendors in this category have a demonstrated habit of disappearing without notice. The same discipline applies to the rest of your stack, from your WordPress SEO tools to your backups.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Plugin Rank still available in 2026?
No. As of 1 September 2026, pluginrank.com doesn’t resolve on any public DNS resolver we tested, so the site cannot be reached. Awesome Motive, which acquired it in June 2021, doesn’t list it among the brands on its own site, and we found no shutdown announcement. If you’re still being billed, cancel through your bank or your original receipt rather than looking for a dashboard.
What is the best alternative to Plugin Rank?
PluginTracker.io for most authors, at USD 48/year for ten plugins and 200 keywords, with a free tier for one plugin. That’s 90% below what Plugin Rank charged for its five-plugin Plus tier. Pick PluginTracker.dev instead, at USD 119.88/year for one plugin, if you need install telemetry and deactivation reasons too.
How do I check my WordPress plugin’s ranking for free?
Two ways. PluginTracker.io’s free tier tracks one plugin across three keywords with 14 days of history and no card. Or query api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/ with a search term and read your position straight from the results. That’s the same data every paid tracker uses. WP.MD covers the directory-wide picture free, though it won’t track your plugin specifically.
How many tags can a WordPress plugin have?
Five. WordPress.org’s official plugin handbook specifies “1 to 5 comma separated terms” in the readme header, and forbids using a competitor’s plugin name as a tag. With 67,113 plugins in the directory as of 1 September 2026, those five slots are the scarcest keyword real estate you own. That’s why authors track whether changing them worked.
Why did WordPress.org stop showing plugin install growth?
On 2 October 2022 the meta team removed the active-install growth chart from plugin pages and disabled the API behind it, citing insufficient data obfuscation. Developers pushed back hard in the WordPress Slack #meta channel and it was never restored. Every paid tracker now estimates daily install movement inside the rounded bucket WordPress.org publishes, rather than reporting growth directly.
Final Verdict
Plugin Rank is finished, and its ending is the lesson. One of the largest companies in WordPress owned it. Elliot Condon and Brad Touesnard endorsed it. It still went from a working site in March 2026 to an unresolvable domain by September, with no announcement to anyone paying for it.
Replace it with PluginTracker.io. Free for one plugin, USD 48 a year for ten, and cheap enough that a second collapse costs you data rather than money. Add WP.MD for competitor research, since it’s free and answers a question the trackers handle worse. Choose PluginTracker.dev only when telemetry is the point, on annual billing, knowing there’s no refund. Skip wpMetrics until it publishes a price and a changelog entry from this decade. And whichever you pick, run a monthly CSV export. The WordPress.org API will outlive all of them, and it’s the only source none of these companies control.
Building the rest of your WordPress stack around this? Start with the plugins worth installing on a new site, which is the reader’s-eye view of the directory you’re competing in. Curious how ownership changes play out over years? Read our piece on what happened to the Disable Comments plugin. It sold at auction and is still shipping updates six years later. And if directory rankings are driving signups, the speed of the site they land on decides what happens next. Compare your options for WordPress hosting before you spend another month optimizing a readme.