In the last few years, we’ve focused almost exclusively on designing and producing responsive websites in WordPress. It made sense that we would gravitate towards WooCommerce as a handy shop framework. Over the last five years, as WooCommerce has grown, the folks at WooThemes have found a way to strike a nice balance between making the framework robust enough to meet all of our clients’ needs, while also keeping their core product simple and straightforward so that we can focus on designing remarkable online shops.
Recently, the folks running WooCommerce made some significant changes to their pricing model. These include increasing all product prices and capping support and updates – they have transitioned from lifetime support of plug-ins to one year of support with a necessity to purchase more support each and every year. This is a fairly big change for us (we are working on a website presently that currently has eight WooCommerce plug-ins and counting).
First off, let’s make it clear: we don’t begrudge them this change. They are quite honest for their reason: “We made a mistake with our original pricing & support model.” They make a great product, our clients love it, and I’ll be happy to support the new pricing model moving forward; we’d rather have them course correct and stick around than hold on to an untenable model and disappear.
Additionally, we were also given a choice on how we’d work with the licenses we have now.
You can elect to support our new pricing and support plan…or to have your…purchases grandfathered in…We at WooThemes won’t treat any customer any differently, should you decide to be grandfathered in, or fundamentally disagree with our pricing and licensing change….The decision is entirely yours.
This is where it gets tough for us. We absolutely understand their course correction and are happy to purchase based on their new pricing model (and build that model into our costs over time). However, we have made promises to a handful of our clients based on the licenses we purchased. And, nothing means more to us than the promises we make to clients.
After a fair amount of soul searching, we’ve come to the decision to opt for sticking with our original contract. This decision was not made lightly, nor was it made because we do not support the new pricing model. We are, instead, committed to offering our clients products and licenses we promised them when we built their websites.
Kudos to the folks at WooThemes for honoring their promises allowing us to honor ours. This has shown us how committed they are to their quality and word. This experience has turned us from regular users to avid fans.
