New version requires API and free version is useless

  • Today I check my site and notice the plugin’s main screen showing a banner that says Your trial is over. Go Premium. Basically the free version is useless – nothing you can use. The plugin description mentions all these great features little you know that those are all paid features. If this is not bait and switch, what is?

    With the paid plans, yes you’ll get some pretty good features. Though my review here is for the Free version, not how awesome the paid version is.

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by skylabb.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi @skylabb

    We are not sure we fully understand your opinion and we will be happy to discuss with you in support to help you or to understand the different issues.

    The last update allows you to have only one API key to manage all your sites whereas before we had one API key per site. WP Umbrella is above all a tool that allows you to manage, monitor and maintain multiple sites.

    If you only have one site, it’s understandable that you don’t see any immediate interest.
    Then, we have chosen to reduce the plugin to the minimum to show you the relevant information:
    – Your performance (uptime, response time, latency)
    – The number of errors detected
    – And some critical warnings

    Each of the information has then a direct link to the project in our application so that you have more detail on this information. This allows us to be more efficient.

    We remain at your disposal if you have any questions and we regret that this has led you to give us a star.

    Have a nice day,
    WP Umbrella

    Thread Starter skylabb

    (@skylabb)

    Hi, I appreciate for your quick courteous response and detail explanation. I’ll pay this back with two more review stars.

    Basically when the 14-day free trial is over, there’s little left in this plugin of value. There are upgrade buttons everywhere on the plugin main screen. While I understand that a business needs to generate revenues, the majority of WP free plugins offer valuable basic functions and paid advanced or add-ons. I have upgraded several other plugins to their commercial version myself once I was happy with the free version and wanted more.

    I would be happy if the free plan includes most of the main features for one site. And paid plans include more sites.

    Thank you.

    Hello again dear Steven,

    It’s important for us to keep our users happy and quick answers at support are important for us.

    We will diminish the number of CTA to go premium: if you feel this way, it means there are too many of them.

    When we started WP Umbrella, uptime, performance and php error monitoring were actually free for one website – and if people wanted to get more websites, they had to upgrade.

    … And people were just creating several accounts ?? so we have had to take this decision since monitoring websites have, in the end, a significant cost.

    We will soon release a new feature that should be free: the ‘critical warnings’ monitoring. We will tell people critical information about their WordPress websites security and performance and give them tips about how to easily fix these warnings. This feature will be fully free.

    We are a new product, and we are still trying to figure out our product market fit (pricing included), so we really appreciated that you move from 1 to 3 stars: we are always happy to engage with users!

    Speaking of which, please shoot us a message at [email protected], I’d like to invite you in our beta-testing pool if you want! ??

    Kind regards,

    Thread Starter skylabb

    (@skylabb)

    Yes, the critical warnings feature sounds good. I think the majority just want the essential features. Also I realize that you’re solving a problem of many users creating multiple free accounts.

    Will send you and email per your suggestion. Thank you.

    stv

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by skylabb.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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