Not happy

I’m sorry to hear you’re unhappy.

Would you care to elaborate on the specific features that you feel are being nickle and dimed and the ones that you believe should be included in the core plugin?

There are thousands and thousands of users that are using the free Easy Digital Downloads plugin by itself without any extensions (free or paid). I feel that’s a pretty good indication that the core plugin is a complete ecommerce platform that provides the vast majority of features that users need, all at zero cost.

Just a small FYI, the highest priced extension we have is $83, of which we only have 2 (out of over 200 available). The average price for extensions is much lower, around $30.

Hi Pippin,

Unfortunately I have to agree with the original poster somewhat. I myself have spent a few hundred dollars on plugins/extensions for my online store. I do feel it was unfair to change the terms of the plugins to a subscription model to receive updates and fixes after a year. This was never indicated when purchasing the plugins, and may have changed my decision to use EDD when I initially switched.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because you personally have helped me out many times on the forums and have always been very professional. And your prices are very reasonable versus hiring a developer to write this for me.

But on the other side of that coin is the seemingly countless times when an update would break functionality on the site, or plugins would conflict or be incompatible with each other. It was never convenient, to put it nicely.

The end result? I just don’t update plugins anymore. And I likely won’t buy new ones either. While I respect that your time is money and you need to pay yourself and your employees, you’ve also lost a customer for the foreseeable future. I likely won’t be able to hold out forever, I’m sure some wordpress update won’t work and I’ll have to update EDD which will cascade into me being forced into updating and paying for other plugins.

@imbuefx: Please post your own review of the plugin rather than adding to someone else’s review.

@imbuefx I”m sorry to hear that, but please note that we never changed things over to yearly renewals: they have always been yearly renewals since day one. The only thing we changed with pricing was with the number of sites a license was for. That is the only thing we changed, and all previous customers were grand fathered into unlimited site licenses.

Note: the primary purpose of updates is to fix problems, not cause them. Obviously no one is perfect and update do occasionally break things, but we always try our hardest to prevent that as much as possible.

What is with you people?

Plugin developers working as much as you do and maybe more. And it is as simple as that; developers need to make a living as well.

An average price of the add-ons is $30 per year when the average hourly rate of a developer is $50 ( or more ). So how can that be expensive, seriously !?!?

By constantly updating the core plugin and the add-ons developers make sure that you up to date with your site. If it is security, bug fixes and new features. And so, if the developer is constantly working on the plugin and you keep receiving updates it makes sense that the developer will keep getting paid for his time. It can be weekly, monthly, yearly and so on.

You can choose to either by an add-on or not ( if you think the price or terms are unfair ) but regardless the choice you make you still need to respect the developer choice of price and terms. And you have the right of course to give your opinion about the price of the add-ons but giving a 1 star review because in your opinion the add-ons are expensive or because you think that everything should be free is unfair and insulting.

A review should be about the functionality of a plugin. about how well its features work, about performance, errors, bugs, warning, code quality and so on.

From my experience, if you are trying to build your business only by using free plugins and themes or if your business does not produce enough to cover the expense of few add-ons a year then you are in the wrong business.

1 star? This plugin is free and it is the best free digital download plugin without question. Sure it would be nice to have all the extras for free, however, money doesn’t grow on trees.