Hi @gegan249,
I’m sorry to hear about your experience though you are extremely exaggerating. We do show a list of the paid features on the right side of _our_ plugin’s settings. This comes in handy, so users can learn about the extra features they can get if they upgrade to our paid plan. Naturally, we also benefit from that, because we do want users to become our customers. It’s a common practice of freemium products. There are no “click-baits” nor “spam.”
Regarding the Rich-Snippets, different products use different business models. Some plugins do offer it for free, and you are welcome to choose them. Unlike other plugins, RatingWidget is a “serviceware” plugin, which means that the data is stored on our servers. To support the rich-snippets, there’s a higher load on our API since we need to load the ratings data before the HTML is rendered, and even though it’s cached daily, that resources load cost us money, which other plugins don’t have.
We are fully transparent with our plugin and our service coverage and understand that our service is not a good fit for every website. One of the main benefits of using a service instead of a standard plugin is that all the data and resource consumption are happening on our servers. So even if your website has millions of pageviews per day, by using RatingWidget, there’s almost ZERO effect on your site’s performance.
I would recommend looking at the YASR plugin as an alternative. Good luck!
