Hi @rermis
I receive a notification at the top of almost all WP admin pages offering a free trial to Pixel Manager’s premium plugin,
Yes, they appear once on every shop where you install the free version of the plugin. After you dismiss it, it doesn’t show up anymore. Is that really so much of a hassle, compared to how much you get with the plugin?
WordPress has made it clear that the admin notice feature in WordPress was designed for providing crucial information about plugins and is not intended to be used as a billboard.
WordPress has written that rule for plugins that are “constantly” nagging, which our plugin is not I believe. It is just a dismissible notification, that’s it.
(Yes, there is another one asking for a review. But that’s as easy to dismiss as this one.)
Would it be possible to isolate these ads to the plugin’s settings page?
One big difference to many other, popular plugins, is that our plugin really requires just one interaction when you set it up. Then, ideally, you will never have to touch it again. Yet, you get a lot of features which can help running your (or the client’s) shop very profitably. Thus, isolating the message to just the plugin setup page would not be of help, and in a way also not fair, to us. On the other hand, developing, maintaining and supporting the plugin takes a lot of time. Building quality plugins and offering quality support comes at an expense that many plugin authors try to pay with selling a pro version. And don’t forget, the users of the free plugin versions get almost the same amount of features and quality support as the ones of the pro versions. So basically the pro users pay for a lot what you are getting yourself as well. So everyone in this equation (developers, users) tries to balance this in ways that suits his own situation as good as possible.
So my balance is: Yes I offer the plugin for free and give free support, but I also ask if you’d like to try it out and only if you really want to, pay for the pro version.
On the other hand I am hoping that users of the free version like you accept that a few notifications which help to sell the pro version are not too much of a hassle in return for getting lots of features and free support.
Is it really too much to dismiss such a small notification in comparison to what you get from the free version?
And look, while WordPress (an Auttomatic software) does have this guideline, Auttomatic also uses all its options to monetize WordPress, for instance through JetPack (also an Auttomatic software). JetPack “nags” users to upgrade to the paid version. And if I remember correctly JetPack repeats the notification. So Auttomatic doesn’t follow their own advice (Maybe that has changed. I don’t know the current state.).
While writing this answer I found that JetPack offers a filter to disable upsell ads add_filter( 'jetpack_just_in_time_msgs', '__return_false' );. I will look into building that kind of filter into my plugin too. But, I wonder if enabling a filter for the developer is not just as much, if not even more hassle, compared to simply dismissing the message. What do you think?
In any case I will optimize the delivery. Probably not showing the messages on dev environments (localhost, dev.example.com, etc.) will help improve the situation for users like you, and will keep the exposure of the trial message still at a fair level for my plugin (on production websites).
I probably will add a similar filter like JetPack. But I think it will be wise to have a more granular filter, one that can suppress info messages (like the trial message), and one that can suppress all messages, including alerts.
Regards
Aleksandar
