moonone2000

Thank you for responding @bvytis.

I don’t begrudge you needing to get paid for what you do. However, if I’m not mistaken I don’t think you or anybody else offers a free version of their theme out of pure generosity. You do it because it benefits you to have many users, which gives your product visibility, and then out of those many users, hopefully enough will like it enough to pay for the premium version.

Neve is a great theme, one of the nicest, most customizable themes I’ve ever seen. It is one of the most popular themes out of thousands because it is so good. You’ve got over 300,000 installations. If you aren’t getting enough people to pay for the premium version then maybe the free version is actually too good. I understand this would be a problem for you.

But removing a feature you had previously offered and that was integral to the site, specifically a change that causes a person’s personal copyright notice to just vanish (and change the formatting of the footer in the process) is a terrible way to entice people to your paid version. A major factor in selecting a theme, at least for me, is trust in the developers. Removing someone’s copyright and making it impossible to put it back without hacking the theme (or trying to find currently nonexistent funds to upgrade) gives one the impression you just don’t care if you really screw things up for users.

Can you honestly not find a better way than this to entice people to your pro version? There must be other, better ways for you to move people to your paid version than holding their copyright notice hostage. There must be things you can offer to persuade users to upgrade rather than causing them trouble like this. Never updating beyond 3.2 is obviously not an option for anyone who wants to maintain the security of their site.

I had been planning to buy the business version of your theme once I got things up and running. My site and the small business associated with it are in their very early stages so I had been using the free version until I got things really rolling and worked out any kinks. I did think Neve pro had enough value to buy it until now and was already planning to. But holding my copyright hostage to prod me in that direction actually makes me less inclined to do so.

Update. It’s 14 hours later and I see you have now updated your website on the copyright component page to show this component as only being available in the pro version. You probably should also fix the link in the Components Library section of the Neve Footer Builder page where it still says this component is available in the free version. My guess is you will read this, not respond to me, and change that page before the next time I have a look.

It’s becoming apparent to me that you have no response to this post. I guess you don’t care about screwing over the users of your free version. I understand needing to be paid, but removing something a feature like this after offering it for free is a breach of trust. It’s hard to fathom how you think this is the right thing to do.

There are better ways to entice people to pay for the upgrade than breaking their site after they have put a lot of time and energy into building it. My plan was to upgrade to the pro version when I can afford to but now I’m looking into other themes or maybe building my own from scratch.

I would like to add that your website still lists the copyright component as a feature you offer in the free version and ou describe it as “The Copyright component is an indispensable tool of the Header / Footer Builder, that appears at the bottom of the page.”

So apparently you have decided to remove something you considerto be “indispensable”.