Overpaying me after using illegal plugins

Priyatham — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third article about client horror stories, about funny and ironic situations I end up in, working with few clients. You can find the rest here

Non-tech company website

Any small business or not a tech startup generally doesn't have a code based website. A no code or the famous WordPress website is their go to. Which is perfect for its worth. It's simple, it does the job fantastically. But the problem comes when they try to grow want to have an online presence. That might look like:

I want more items to sell on my Websites
I want to be able to write more company blogs
I want to collect more data and get more leads
I have some new tech people and want to use them

Client and their personal website

My client had two websites, one was for a small hobby website to take classes for little kids and the other is a small startup website. They haven't updated the hobby classes website for more than 3 years and want to include info about new classes and take registration from the WordPress website. So was the other company website portfolio with WordPress. The problem was it was all self setup with pirated/jailbroken plugins for themes and Elementor.

What they failed to do, out of having little knowledge is have auto updates enabled. All the plugins got outdated, some got updated and ran into weird bugs due to new features and hacked core. Night mode and light mode twitching, calendar or database rows not showing up on the UI and such. They haven't disclosed to me about the pirated plugins and said it was more due to bad updates and versions which actually cost them a day. The theme they used from someone was excellent for their small business but not building or forgetting the license key doesn't help because updating it to the new standards and new features such as some integrations with Google Sheets.

I worked hard, scratched my head trying to place manual CSS and JS to fix the issues. They even had a hacked version of Elementor plugin which apparently is used for various widgets which was a terrible idea. It wouldn't open properly and error out to change or edit the interface, so I had to guess which CSS classes it's using for what based on inspection, introduced new sections with the same class names to keep them consistent with the rest of the page. Carousels were something I had to override. More and more of the issues were fixed but, slowly I discovered the hacked plugins and when I asked them about it, they agreed with me after 2 days.

There were 2 bugs on the UI from homepage, the logo wouldn't work with dark mode and whatever I do with CSS or play around the interface of the theme, I simply cannot solve due to customization limitations and how broken the whole business site was. Elementor had version incompatibility on WordPress which I realized after reading some forums. I asked for a day more, tried every way of doing it, the only way was to just pay for the theme. I am not a WordPress wizard but, I don't think wizards like working with pirated versions either.

A cool skull pirate before a wonky UI with gibberish

The world of WordPress is something I found really fascinating, it's huge with paid tiers and the famous ones. One thing I hate with WordPress plugins, is the constant nagging to buy a paid tier from a free tier and excessively locking features. I got to work on two more clients who used WordPress. But in all three of them, the sites internally a mess. Sometimes made a mess with PHP intentionally by the developer to have the site owners pay for modifications additions in PHP rather than site owners able to edit on their own. One of which is also the developer who gave DMCA notices

I think they believe that they got the skills and are tech-literate enough to use hacked plugins or found it cool to use them. When it all came crashing down, they asked for help. I say it's more bad than fun. Using such things will only make the website worse and put any company or business in security risk.

Finally, they realized the issue and told they are going to start paying for them and bought the plugins. Which were $75 for a license. And my consulting fees were $500 for a day of work. Took $1250 in total for the work, in fairness I did solve issues and updating their WordPress version with all the other actual free plugins and made emails work again so, not a complete waste of company money.

Buying the permanent license would have been much simpler or having me migrate to a pure HTML, CSS, JS or use a really nice open source CMS or theme that can still fit into the WordPress. Forget electricians or folks in trades, even we blame the person who wrote the software before and try to start everything from scratch. But I feel like if you are not going to change the website yourself, what's the point of having it on WordPress website yourself or what's the point of having it in WordPress 🤔. Maybe they think WordPress developers are easier to find and cheaper (I don't want my fellow WordPress developers to be taken less seriously), let me know your thoughts in comments below.

Legality may not be enforced to a small startup but, using open source software with credits and appropriate license is way better if you don't like to pay. It offers better compatibility and saves on getting consultants to solve issues that are not worth having in the first place. Growing a website to have complex integrations or interactive elements is worth paying others to develop and a good problem to have.

If you have such good problems, do let me know maybe I can fix yours too. I hope yours doesn't end up in work horror series.

Websites on

Overpaying me after using illegal plugins

Non-tech company website

Client and their personal website