Should Support be Part of a Plugin Purchase? March 04 2014

All of the premium plugins, apps, or extensions that we sell as a company include the software with support rather than just the software itself. Since some customers believe that WordPress software (or open source software in general) should be cheap or free, many have advocated for cheaper plugins without support bundled into the plugin price (just paying for the software + updates).

We’re against this approach, and would argue that developers should always keep support bundled with plugin purchases.

What are you buying?

When you purchase software, what are you buying? What’s the goal of the purchase?

Users want to customize the functionality of their site since the base WordPress installation doesn’t do what they need, be it eCommerce functionality, creating layout shortcodes, or site backups. By the very nature of that objective, each user’s needs are going to be different, usage of the plugin itself will be varied, and the plugin itself may be the skeleton for a larger project. The plugin also has to maintain compatibility with each version of WordPress and possibly other plugins and has to be theme-able (if it affects anything on the frontend of the site).

That’s a tall order, and invariably users will have questions, will bring up other plugins that aren’t compatible but should be, or want to customize that plugin. Not to mention that people will always have questions about how the plugin works or just want that little pointer for help.

The first issue this brings up is one of judgment – where do you draw the line? What’s just a question and what’s ‘support’? For us, having to tell someone that they’ll have to pay to get help, especially if we’ve answered smaller questions for free, always ends up souring the relationship. You have to tell a user, “Sorry I’m not going to help with this thing you see as ‘a tiny little question’ unless you buy support.” If you just help from the beginning and in any circumstance because they’re a customer, it makes the experience far better and eliminates the need to make a judgment as to what should be support and what’s just a pointer or help.

Incentivizing Plugin Growth

The next reason that support should be included in the plugin is that it incentivizes the creation of a great user experience and the corresponding “environment”, such as tutorials, documentation, etc.

If support is what’s monetized, then it makes sense that the developer should drive users towards support, as that’s where they actually make money. It’s a disincentive to make the user experience easier. We don’t fault them for that, but that’s not the choice we make in creating our products and don’t think it’s ideal.

If we simply include support, the developer is far more motivated to improve the plugin. Since we don’t charge users for each question, we have an incentive to work on limiting the number of questions they have to send our way to lighten our workload.

In conclusion

Finally, a part of the value of the software is our expertise and help. Users can purchase software from anyone. However, they purchase from us because we’re the WooCommerce experts and we hire other great developers to help us. By encouraging a dialogue with our customers when they have questions or concerns, we can continuously improve our software, so we want support to come to us and for people to feel confident in using our products. Bundling support also lets us focus on development instead of spending time determining which questions we should answer and which we should ask customers to pay for.

By bundling support into the purchase price, it simplifies the question of “Do I answer this question or help this person?” because the answer is always yes. However, it also encourages us to limit the amount of support requests we get. As a result, we strive to develop software that’s bug-free, easy to use, well-documented, and constantly maintained. Users benefit from a system with clear expectations and pricing transparency – you know exactly how much you’ll pay every year, regardless of the problems you encounter, and know that we’re always working to improve your experience with our products.

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