Took away features & expect you to buy them back – ZERO support

@tamierp We are sorry that our plugin did not meet your expectation, especially with support. But that is the difficulty of spending hundreds of hours developing the plugin and then spending time providing support without any monetary return.

We announced the pro version on November 3, 2020, and explained the situation. Since then for 1 year and 8 months, we notified our users with admin notice. Please feel free to read the post if you haven’t read it already: https://freessl.tech/blog/auto-install-free-ssl-needs-your-help-to-survive/

As per the announcement, we offer our Existing users 6 months of premium license free of cost. So you can still use the plugin at no cost till 31 December 2022.

The benefits of the Free version are that you still get

Let’s Encrypt? SSL Certificate is FREE. But they provide it through their API. If you are not a programmer, you need to study and practice programming for years to be able to use the API of Let’s Encrypt? to generate a single Free SSL Certificate for your WordPress website.

Here is where ‘Auto-Install Free SSL’ comes into play. With this WordPress plugin, you can generate the Let’s Encrypt? Free SSL Certificate with ease! You don’t need to have programming or coding experience to set it up.

However, you need to spend some time using this tool to generate and install the SSL certificate. The premium version does this for you and saves your time. Now it’s your choice which version you use or not.
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For your information, this plugin and all WordPress plugins are released under ‘GNU General Public License’. As per WordPress’s practice, it is mentioned in the readme.txt file.

GNU GPL tells us, “This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. … When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.”

Sir,

I never asked for free support. I asked about the difference between the two products you had and if and how to use them on namecheap, those are simple questions that should have clear documentation. I also asked how much you intended to charge after 6 months because that was not posted anywhere. I feel these questions should not be considered “support” but rather standard instruction and transparent pricing.

Yes, you posted a notice, but the meaning was unclear to me. I don’t know if there is a language barrier or what, but I did not understand your notice – I did not understand if this was something in addition to what you had in place or replacing it completely. There was no further info, there was no pricing info, and I tried to ask you repeatedly. And your website seemed abandoned. Nothing new was added for a couple of years, and zero questions where answered on it. It looked like you made the vague and incomplete announcement and then disappeared.

It would have been so gracious of you to grandfather those of us who have already been loyal users who were not using the automatic features in by letting us keep our feature, or giving us a special deal like maybe $5/mo as long as we use the version where we have to manually generate certificates. That would have been more than be fair. I was so grateful for your plugin once I found someone unrelated to your website to help me with it how to use it. It took a long time for me to find that help and get it working.

I realize this is your plugin and you feel taken advantage of and have the right to charge whatever you please and I know it is not your concern, but I cannot afford $189/year right now and I will not have it in December, either. My websites are for me to learn on. I am not a programmer, I do not make money off of my websites, though I hope and pray that some day I will after all of these years slowly trying to learn so that I can afford a $189 annual expense, but with blows like this, it sets me back and sends me into a panic.

HOW do I use your new free version with my Namecheap websites? If you change your product, there has to be some new instructions on how to use it now. I do not see any new instructions for this new barebones version.

My namecheap websites are all under one shared package and are essentially subdomain of my main one, but I have purchased domain names for them. I have 5 or 6 projects I am working on, again, I do not make money and I have virtually no traffic, so you don’t have to feel like I’m trying to rip you off. Since you removed the ability to just click every few months and generate new SSLs for them all, I do not know what to do. What are the instructions to add SSLs to each of my subdomains individually now? I have to get this figured out by next week.

Please check the installation tab for the documentation. The videos are made with subdomains. The process is exactly the same for domains too. We have made video tutorials for cPanel and Plesk, the most popular web hosting control panels. If your Namecheap hosting’s control panel is cPanel or Plesk, these will help you.

I found your comment written 10 months ago, “all of my websites are receiving the SSL except for one”. This clearly indicates that our plugin was working on your multiple websites correctly and saved a lot of your $. I am sorry to mention that you didn’t spend a single minute writing a favorable positive rating and review for that. That is your choice, of course. I have nothing to say about that. But now you have left a negative rating. This is very unfortunate and discouraging for free plugin developers.