Hello bsowebteam.

We completely understand your surprise and the frustration about the price.

If you can spare a couple of minutes of your time, I'd like to explain.

The main reason of our decision, however, is not the wish to try to ‘rob off’ the existing or new customers.

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 like yourself we prepared special incentives to convert to become our direct customers, without having Envato as a middleman.

If you're interested in converting to our yearly subscription license, I can reach out to our sales team, and have them provide a discount for you.

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.

Hello again bsowebteam.

Dully noted.

We are constantly working on new features. Since the store has been released, we did have an increased amount of tickets, but simple questions which refer to documentation are answered in a few seconds, since most issues are related to the user not reading, or not understanding what documentation says. Bugs and issues are being addressed thoroughly, and we tend to provide support even when it involves overstepping the included support (like help with queries, callbacks, databases, conflicts with third party plugins, etc.).

Any help is appreciated, so you can always help us develop the software further, depending on your knowledge and willingness to help. For example - we've received new hooks from our customers, which have been inserted in the documentation; also - customers helped us locate bugs we weren't even aware of, and our developers fixed them for the next releases, and so on.

As we speak - our developers are working on some additional features that have been requested repeatedly, and we are planning on releasing a few major updates in the next few months. We've added new chart types, added an option so when users accidentally delete the plugin from the Plugins page the tables will still remain saved (an option released with v2.5.2), and so on.

The product is constantly in development, and we have recently discussed the feature you mentioned here. And not just for Excel tables, but for any table that would require dynamic URL detection. Our developers are going to work on that, so you can add a pre-defined URL for your website, and when you edit the table, you simply need to add the page so the plugin will take you to that page. For instance, you pre-define "http://www.yourwebsite.com/", and you wish to add a column so a user may be able to see a certain product in a detailed page - you would type in "product_id=1", and the URL will dinamically change to "http://www.yourwebsite.com/product_id=1". This should also affect the URL entry for Excel tables.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards.