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.
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.
Thank you for the Prompt reply. You've explained well.
One more question about the features listed in the page "https://wpamelia.com/demos/#Features-list. Are they all included with the $59 plan? or do we need to buy additional add-ons to use them?
Also, I want to know that it is possible creating various prices for a single event.
Hey there,
Just a question: what are the differences between purchasing Amelia Booking Plugin in your site for $59.00 and purchasing in Envato Market for $299?
Thanks,
Best Regards,
Senthi
Hi Senthi,
Thank you for your inquire.
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.
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.
Kind Regards,
Miloš Jovanović
[email protected]
Rate my support
wpDataTables: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Front-end and back-end demo | Docs
Amelia: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Amelia demo sites | Docs | Discord Community
You can try wpDataTables add-ons before purchasing on these sandbox sites:
Powerful Filters | Gravity Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Formidable Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Master-Detail Tables
Hi Bogdan,
Thank you for the Prompt reply. You've explained well.
One more question about the features listed in the page "https://wpamelia.com/demos/#Features-list. Are they all included with the $59 plan? or do we need to buy additional add-ons to use them?
Also, I want to know that it is possible creating various prices for a single event.
Best Regards,
Senthi
Hi Senthi,
There are no difference in features based on which plan you choose, Every plan have a same features and we do not have add-ons.
The only difference in plan is the number of domains that you can use.
Also, I want to know that it is possible creating various prices for a single event.
Sorry but unfortunately this is not possible at the moment.
Best regards.
Kind Regards,
Miloš Jovanović
[email protected]
Rate my support
wpDataTables: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Front-end and back-end demo | Docs
Amelia: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Amelia demo sites | Docs | Discord Community
You can try wpDataTables add-ons before purchasing on these sandbox sites:
Powerful Filters | Gravity Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Formidable Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Master-Detail Tables
Thank you Bogdan.
Hi Senthi,
You are welcome.
Best regards.
Kind Regards,
Miloš Jovanović
[email protected]
Rate my support
wpDataTables: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Front-end and back-end demo | Docs
Amelia: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Amelia demo sites | Docs | Discord Community
You can try wpDataTables add-ons before purchasing on these sandbox sites:
Powerful Filters | Gravity Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Formidable Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Master-Detail Tables