Hello hrvresort.

You are correct - it doesn't matter if your license expired or not, you should still receive all plugin updates, and work with it without issues. Envato license would only extend the support period.

Please provide me a temporary WP-admin login for your site where this happens, and Database access (PHPMyAdmin, or C-Panel) so we could log in and take a look ‘from the inside’ as that’s the most efficient way to see and resolve the issue. We do not interfere with any data or anything else except for the plugin (in case that’s a production version of the site), and of course we do not provide login data to third party. You can write credentials here just check Private Reply so nobody can see them except us.

As for the pricing - I'll ask you to spare a couple of minutes of your time, so I can explain the price.

We completely understand your surprise when you saw the price. The main reason of our decision, however, is not the wish to try to ‘rob off’ the existing or new customers, or anything like that.

Reality is that our products require a growing amount of effort to maintain. Each day we receive 80-100 support tickets, and we do our best to resolve each customer’s issues. In parallel, we are developing new products and new features for our products. So, that takes a growing amount of investments to be able to keep on at this pace without sacrificing quality on any of the fronts.

Envato, on the other side of things made a lot of very disappointing decisions, and overall we don’t like the direction to which it is heading as a marketplace (the policy is now more corporation-style). I think they are trying to transition the customers as much as possible to using Elements. They are not doing anything to help authors with items promotion, 99% of the marketing and advertising activities are financed by us (another big cut of our revenue, to make sure the new customers keep coming). Their aggressive marketing of Elements everywhere, including the checkout, is at the same time “cannibalizing” a noticeable amount of the customers that we bring to our item page, without us even receiving a referral cut for that.

Add to that their fees that sum up to almost 50% of the item price for exclusive authors. And the fact that the licenses are lifetime (no more than 10% renew support). It is very hard to maintain and scale the software development in an economically viable way under these terms. As an example, some customers open up to 60 tickets during 2-3 years, typically not bug-related but just assistance requests for a custom use case, average time to resolution is 15-30 minutes per ticket, so you may understand that a 50% cut of a lifetime license cannot pay for 30 hours of  a support manager. That’s an extreme case of course, but it explains the point.

So Envato was actually a very expensive and not so helpful middleman at this point. When we just started it was a great place, and we are very grateful for the starting opportunity it gave us, but now the products and the business itself “overgrown” the marketplace model.

We built and launched our own online store, and started selling the items through it, having to opt out of exclusivity on Envato. And as non-exclusive authors we would now receive an average 20%-25% of each sale, which would be complete nonsense economically.

We considered disabling our account completely, but in this case our existing customers would not be able to access future updates (which we provided as lifetime at the time of their purchase), and would be very upset. So we set a restrictive high price instead. We understand that many new potential customers are upset, but the alternatives would be even worse.

For the existing customers we prepared special incentives to convert to become our direct customers, without having Envato as a middleman.

If you're interested in becoming our direct customer, I can reach out to our sales team, and ask them to provide a one-time discount coupon for you.

The new licenses are:

Basic - Full plugin that can be used only for one domain or project - price $59.

Pro - Full plugin that can be used for 3 domains - price $109.

Developer - Full plugin that can be used on unlimited number of domains - price $249.

If you are from a country where VAT applies, a VAT charge will be applied to the transaction.

These prices are all based on a yearly subscription and all licenses include support and monthly updates the whole time subscription lasts, unlimited tables, unlimited charts, conditional formatting and separate database support.

If you decide to cancel your subscription at any time, you will still receive updates and have support one year after the purchase date. After that, you will have a functioning plugin, but you will not receive any new updates unless you renew the subscription.

My apologies for such a long text, but I wanted to make sure you understand our decision and hopefully see that it is reasonable. For obvious reasons we cannot provide the full explanation publicly at Envato pages.

Best regards.

Hi again hrvresort.

Great news.

Thanks for letting me know.

If you have some other questions or issues, please feel free to open a new ticket and we'll gladly help.

Best regards.