Support Policy – README First!

Wait… the site that wants me to pay $99 to HELP YOU OUT by informing you about Plug-in bugs? How about I keep my $99… and let your users uninstall the plugin out of frustration. What a horrible business model.

Hey Chastise,

I’m sorry that our support page isn’t as clear as it could be. We’re always trying to find ways to make what we do better.

We answer support tickets everyday from users who do not have support contracts with us. The option of priority support is there for those users who need immediate answers to their questions and do not want to chance having to wait for an answer.

If there is an actual bug in our plugin, we are more than happy to fix it. In fact, most of the bug fixes that are released for Ninja Forms come from users who place support tickets in our system for free. All you have to do is sign up at our site for an account. No fees. No hassles.

Those with priority support get quicker, and often more in-depth, answers than our free support users, but you will always be answered. If what you are experiencing is indeed a bug, we will fix it and roll that into the next version of the plugin. If you are looking for code to help with a specific use-case, we may ask that you upgrade to priority support to cover the expense of helping you write some custom code.

Again, I am sorry that we were not as clear as possible on our support page. If you have suggestions about the type of verbage we could put on that page to make this clear, we would really appreciate hearing it. Our goal is to listen to every user’s issues, but in order to do that, we must corral them all into one location, and our site works best for that.

The columns clearly list what is available for free, and what is available if you pay. I don’t buy the whole “maybe we weren’t clear enough” jargin.

Under FREE:
-Answer Basic Product Questions
-72 Hour Turnaround

Under $29-$99 Paid:
-Answer Basic Product Questions
-Address Discovered Bugs
-Advanced Technical Support
-12 Hour Turnaround

I understand Turnaround time and even Technical Support restrictions. But we shouldn’t have to pay to discuss “discovered bugs” with you. Most developers PAY USERS to test their programs for bugs. Not the other way around.

If you honestly think you have found an actual bug then sign-up and and submit a ticket and see how we actually handle things before your judge our “jargon”.

Most people who think they are submitting “bugs” are actually asking about “Basic Product Questions” because more than 95% of all requests we get are mis-configurations, javascript errors introduced by other plugins or themes, or email issues because of servers.

The truth of the matter is, regardless of how we choose to handle support for our FREE product, anyone who has reached out to us through the channels we have provided will tell you that our support is second to none. Both paid and free. Just read our reviews and you will see most are about our support even more so than our product.

So instead of getting offended why not submit a ticket and withhold judgement. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Unless you’ve already made up your mind about us. ??

Noone here is offended, we are simply discussing customer service. Don’t make it personal. I already submitted a ticket, well before I made my first post here. It was during my “72 Hour Response Period” that I was on these forums looking for quicker answers, and came across one of your other comments discouraging people from asking questions here, and referring them to this thread… which conveniently links them right to the pricing plans for your service. And again, there is nothing wrong with charging for services you perform on our behalf. My qualm was with charging to discuss “bugs”, which is a service to you.

On a different note: The response to my ticket was a “copy/paste blanket” response telling me to perform the actions that I had already explicitly stated that I performed in my ticket message.

i.e.
Me: “Hello. I disabled all my plugins, addons, and reverted to the default theme, but XYZ problem still exists.”
Response: “Disable all your plugins, addons, and revert to the default theme, and see if that helps.”
Me: “Ummmm…”

Typical helpdesk runaround. Let’s hope there are better responses for the people that actually pay $99. But in any case, I have already installed a different developer’s plugin which is working splendidly, so I will simply depart by saying… “Thanks for your time.”

Hey Chastise,

I’m very sorry that you had such a negative experience. We don’t believe that is representative of our customers’ as a whole, but I do regret that you were not helped to the level that you expected and deserved.

I am glad that found a solution that works for you and wish you continued success.

SO tired of all these crappy plugins getting on the WordPress site..

I think it’s time WordPress starts putting these into a separate location..

I.e.
Free – Doesn’t cost the user anything
Any plugin that isn’t gimped, limited, or otherwise hobbled unless paying extra goes in this area of the site.

Commercial – Costs user money.
If the plugin has any sort of paid ” premium ” “extension” or otherwise paid-for-usability goes in this area.

I’m sorry but just because you hand out an almost useless plugin for free so you can sell all the ” bits ” that make it work as it should have from get go, doesn’t mean your plugin is free.. it’s GIMPWARE.

Ninja Forms is in the repo because it is a Form Creation Framework. We have included many easy to follow action hooks and filters, so that any type of functionality could be added without needing to modify the core plugin. This means that ANYONE could build an extension for Ninja Forms that allows for file uploads, or conditional logic, or any of the other extensions that we sell on our site. The reason people purchase these options is because they are less expensive than devoting the time to building these features themselves. These features do not HAVE to be purchased at all. Again, if a user wanted, they could develop these features themselves using the extensibility of Ninja Forms.

To your claim that Ninja Forms doesn’t include everything that it should, I would argue that it includes everything that a “basic form plugin” needs: Email notifications, submission editing, easy form creation, importing/exporting forms, favorite fields, etc. The fact that you believe File Uploads, Conditional Logic, Front-End Editing, etc. should be a part of the “basic forms plugin” does not make it so.

We don’t include these features into the core plugin because they have taken extra effort to build, can have greater conflicts dues to server configurations, and generally require greater support. This is also how our developers feed their families; people deserve to be paid for work, even software developers.

I’m sorry if we disagree on these points, and I’m sorry that you didn’t find Ninja Forms to your liking. I won’t apologize, however, for our business model. We have many thousands of users who have never purchased anything from us at all. Ninja Form is working great for them.

I’m closing this thread as it’s not a support thread in the first place. Please start your own threads or use the appropriate support channels for help with this or any other plugins.

The www.ads-software.com forums are for FREE plugin support only – so any discussion of paid versions should not be on these forums.