Subscription scam and poor customer service

Hey ehickstech,

Really sorry to see you felt the need to leave such a negative review. I just wanted to clarify a few things here. As mentioned in your ticket:

https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/i-just-purchased-the-membership-plugin

And through our signup process, we do mention our service is monthly, quarterly or yearly. You confirm this before payment. Furthermore, as a Paypal customer you have to explicitly confirm with Paypal that you want the subscription.

About their customer service… I asked for a refund and they would not give it to me. To add insult to injury, their “solution” was to up-sell me!

What we actually offered you was a goodwill gesture of a free upgrade on your account, we offered to give you access to all of our plugins including our brand new theming project that’s just been released as a beta in the forums for members only. We most certainly didn’t try to get you to buy something more expensive or additional, it was free for the term of your membership.

Next, when I activated the plugin, the function to add protected content to a level stopped working (it worked for the free plugin, but stopped working when I activated the premium, btw).

Why not open a support ticket for this instead? We’d love to help you get that resolved, last thing we want is you being frustrated that you signed up, downloaded, installed and then had issues. Our support team’s always more than happy to provide advice and guidance, we’re always willing to go that extra mile too and simply log in, figure out the issue for you, and get it fixed up. Sometimes it’s a set up issues, sometimes it’s a bug, either way we want to resolve it as quickly as possible for you.

And our guarantee is that if we can’t fix a genuine bug within a reasonable time, we’ll happily refund for you.

We’d love to work with you on this and turn your experience around.

I have to agree with ehickstech to some degree – this company has a ridiculous business model.

Here’s how using a paid plugin usually works:

1. Buy a plugin.

2. Receive updates for a specified period (usually a year).

Here’s how this company, WPMU Dev, wants it to work:

1. Buy a plugin.

2. Forget to cancel your “membership” – which is a monthly charge for the same amount as the plugin (or a slightly higher monthly charge for all their plugins, most of which you’ll never use).

3. If you do remember to cancel the recurring monthly charge, you’ve just bought a plugin that WILL NOT BE UPDATED. Yes, you can gripe about it (if you can find their support, which is difficult if you’re not a paying member) and if you do they’ll probably try to keep you happy, throw you a bone or whatever. The support people are fairly cheerful. But the fact is that the plugin you just bought for $20 costs another $20 every month for standard bug fixes (not necessarily new features).

In addition, you have to install another plugin, an extremely ugly “dashboard,” in order to get your upgrades. This dashboard is a sales tool for WPMU: if you’re a “free member” (i.e. someone who paid for their plugin but didn’t sign up for support) you will constantly be implored–in your own WordPress dashboard–to “Upgrade your membership to unleash the full power of WPMU DEV.”

Why the hell would anyone knowingly sign on for this predatory business model? Because they have a crapload of plugins. And for a few bucks more per month, you get access to all of them, and every upgrade, and support too. This is their goal: to get you to pay $25 per month, month in and month out. I understand why they’d want this… I’d want it too. But do you really need this avalanche of plugins?

No, you don’t. Most of these plugins have free counterparts. Or well-supported paid counterparts that will still cost you less in the long run. I disagree with ehickstech that this is a “scam” – it’s all pretty well spelled out. In my case, I set a reminder to cancel the recurring billing in time, and I only paid the original plugin fee. But it’s an infuriating business model that is an insult to its customers’ intelligence. I find it predatory, and I strongly urge potential buyers to think twice about buying this company’s stuff. In my opinion, It’s just not worth the hassle, and I hate the idea of supporting this sort of business model.

And by the way, the support–which the company touts heavily on its front page–isn’t bad but isn’t particularly great either. It’s very difficult to find support on their website, and of course when you try to access it through the hideous dashboard mentioned above, you are once again cajoled into “upgrading” your “membership.”

If you want to deal with this sort of thing on an ongoing basis, go for it. But if all you want is a plugin, RUN the other way. There are plenty of plugins out there that obviate the need to support a company like WPMU Dev.