{"id":200,"date":"2013-08-08T00:47:31","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T00:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalchild.info\/?p=200"},"modified":"2013-08-08T00:47:31","modified_gmt":"2013-08-08T00:47:31","slug":"thoughts-on-woothemes-pricing-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomadult.local\/thoughts-on-woothemes-pricing-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on WooThemes Pricing Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I use Wordpress<\/a>\u00a0as my CMS of choice for all my client sites for a number of reasons. This includes the theming capabilities and extensibility though plugins. Sometimes when building a client site I will use a commercial theme as a basis and one place I get my themes from is WooThemes<\/a>. They offer some nice themes and a few cool plugins but their biggest product is WooCommerce<\/a>. It’s a great FREE e-commerce solution and they offer many paid extensions for all kinds of things such as payment gateways, shipping, accounting systems and more.<\/p>\n

WooThemes have just announced a new pricing model for all their themes, plugins and woocommerce extensions<\/a>. They are very transparent with what they are wanting and its simple, money. They need more money to give better support and work on new products. All businesses should want this, if you don’t, you suck at business.\u00a0Their justification for the price rise seems to be a little broken though.<\/p>\n

I must note that WooThemes have responded<\/a> to the comments and criticism about the retroactive application to these new models to existing customers. They have given existing customers as of 1 August the option to stay on the lifetime system or update to their new model.<\/p>\n

Their Justification<\/strong><\/p>\n

They use the\u00a0canvas theme<\/a>\u00a0as an example and quote that 5000 tickets this year have been submitted\u00a0for that theme. You buy it in 2009 for $70, getting unlimited support and updates on this theme for 4 years. They then go on to say you charge clients $1000 for this resulting in $48000 in sales to your business. They then claim that you might submit a ticket for each client install resulting in 48 support tickets. (Let me just say if you’ve installed a theme FOURTY-EIGHT<\/strong> times and you still need help, find a new job.) These tickets cost WooThemes about $5 a pop or $240 out-of-pocket for WooThemes. This means for that one sale, four years ago they have made a $170 loss while you made $48,000. It’s not really any of your business how much money I made from the sale of a product you sell that I a can on-sell. You should have highlighted the real costs WooThemes.<\/p>\n

A Real Example<\/strong><\/p>\n

They should have used WooCommerce + Extensions as an example of what this new pricing model will cost you upfront and ongoing. Quite a few people have put this as an example in the comments so I’m going to borrow it. Lets say you have a moderately complex website and need 15 extensions for WooCommerce and a theme, that you create a child theme from.<\/p>\n

Year One<\/em><\/p>\n