Yet, the vast majority of addons are maintained for free. The vast majority of them don’t really receive many bugreports or feature requests, and the majority of those are things the developer will fix for themselves anyway. For simple addons, there’s very little work to maintain them. I have a few which I created around 8.1, and the only change I had to do for them is to update the ToC, and even that was completely optional. Heck, I have an addon I created in WotLK, and it still works as-is.
Most addons aren’t overly complicated, and will work fine for the duration of an expansion at least with a simple ToC bump. And as a maintainer, it’s so very easy to say no to feature requests. You’re not obligated to work more on them than you’d do for your own needs. It’s only a full time job if you make it to be.
Lets take an example: DBM. It has 1295 patrons as of this post, which is $1295/month at least.
Now, lets compare that to Overwolf, which says that mod authors will get 70% of its revenue. According to the information I could find, that 70% of revenue is split between the top 25% most popular mods, across all of Overwolf, including apps built on Overwolf. That puts WoW mods at quite a disadvantage, because the top apps are those that are built on Overwolf, and do a whole lot more than mere WoW addons can do. For example, Gosu.ai, one of the most popular ones, has over 1M users. The latest DBM release has 680k downloads (the closest thing we have to estimate its users), not much more than half of Gosu’s.
With those numbers in mind, 90% of WoW addons will never make the top 25% cut. Even the most popular ones will be facing fierce competition. For most addon developers, Overwolf will not be paying them a cent.
Thing is, by paying Overwolf premium, you’re more likely to support developers who have nothing to do with WoW. Overwolf can, and likely will (if they haven’t already) make deals with some of the most popular WoW addon developers, to include them in one way or the other, but even then, only 70% of your subscription goes to mod developers, and even then, only part of that to WoW addon developers. You could take that money, donate the same amount split between your favourite addons, and they’d be better off, because there’s no 30% overwolf cut, nor other non-wow mods to compete with.
If you want to support addon developers, do so directly.