This is where iThemes will benefit the most, in my opinion. This is where I think capping support at one year will pay off it essentially functions as an insurance policy against those problem customers, while not negatively impacting “normal” customers. On the other hand, there does exist the possibility of a “problem customer”, so to speak – someone who just can’t be satisfied, and is always coming back with another problem. However, I suspect that if they were to track their support interactions by customer (and I hope they already do this), they’d see that most support requests occur early on in a customer’s lifecycle, with little to no support requests after someone has been a customer for over a year. Because of that, the one year cap on support probably wouldn’t matter for most customers. By capping support at one year, iThemes is attempting to limit their exposure to support costs for any given customer. SupportĪs Cory notes both in his post today and the one last August, support is the real killer when it comes to offering unlimited anything (at least in terms of plugins, themes, etc., as opposed to hosting). Cory covers a few key points in his post, and I’d like to explore those points a little more here. With this announcement, however, I think Cory and the iThemes team are making a good move, and I think it’s one that aligns incentives for them and their customers. Saying you can have unlimited of anything forever has got to mean something else suffers. Quality, availability, price … they change. And nothing lasts forever, particular in business. We all know there’s nothing truly unlimited in life. Heck, even Cory Miller himself talked about the dangers of “unlimited” back in August: A lot of times, that’s a pretty strong indicator that the company marketing the plugin, theme, or service is simply trying to make a cash grab, and not planning for the long term. The only difference with the Gold tier (currently priced at $297) is that it includes lifetime updates.īy now, many people in the WordPress community have become wary of anything with the words “unlimited” or “lifetime” in the title, for good reason. They already had a $150 tier, which included a license to use the plugin on unlimited sites, as well as support and updates for one year. This week, the iThemes launched “BackupBuddy Gold” – a new pricing tier for their BackupBuddy plugin.
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