Is there any way to pirate premium WordPress plugins and minimizing the chance of getting malware? Meaning perhaps there are certain sources that are known to provide malware free content and generally have a good reputation. I know piracy will always involve risks but it doesn’t hurt to ask people with first-hand experience. I am even willing to pay but there’s no way I will afford plugins that cost hundreds of dollars a year anytime soon.
Most of the paid plugins I’ve messed with have code to phone home and prevent operation if there’s not a paid license of some sort.
However, before you bother trying to put effort into pirating those, I recommend making certain that what you want isn’t already freely available a different way. Many paid plugins have decent open source and free alternative plugin(s) that can be used instead. You just have to look hard enough in the plugin listing. The WordPress ecosystem is vast, but there are a ton of smarmy assholes charging monthly subscriptions for plugins that replicate features provided by free plugins and hoping you won’t notice.
True, I’ve come across some free plugins that offer better functionality than paid versions. The issue is how often will the dev update it and how long will development continue. It might be risky to depend longterm on something that is free but has 5k downloads vs something that is paid with 50k downloads and is getting constant updates. Of course, if you pirate paid plugins it’s arguably even worse with the updates… so I guess pirating plugins is not really the best of ideas.