Awesome Motive’s product suite of nearly 20 commercial plugins has expanded to include a backup plugin. The company announced its acquisition of Duplicator today, a 12-year-old freemium product with more than 1.5 million users.

In addition to the backup utility, the plugin enables users to migrate, copy, move, or clone a site from one location to another. Commercial licenses range from $49/year to $299.50/year.

Snapcreek co-founders Bob Riley and Cory Lamle, creators of Duplicator, will be moving on to pursue other endeavors but the rest of the team will continue to work on the product at Awesome Motive led by John Turner.

This is the first WordPress business acquisition of 2023, and it’s a major one as 1.5 million users are changing hands to rely on a new company. Users can expect no pricing changes but some have already expressed concern about having to put up with Awesome Motive’s trademark aggressive marketing that litters the WordPress admin with ads and upsells.

In the co-founders’ farewell post, they assured users that Awesome Motive will continue working on their prior roadmap.

“We have shared our extensive feature wishlist, and we know that with Awesome Motive’s resources and experience that wishlist will become a reality much faster,” Riley said.

“As we pass the baton, Cory and I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey. We are extremely grateful to be able to play a small part in the amazing WordPress ecosystem.”