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Carl Hancock Bottom line from someone who’s been doing this for over 4 years now: Gravity Forms wouldn’t exist as we know it if we didn’t have the business model that we have. In fact it probably wouldn’t exist at all. Sure thee are WordPress businesses that survive giving away their product and only charging for support. But in every case I can think of those are small 1 and 2 man shops. How many of those are businesses with an office, employees, fully paid company benefits, and employees who love what they are doing because the business model affords them these benefits and in turn that love is passed down to the customers in the quality of the product itself. Just like the idea that donations could sustain a plugin, the idea that enough users would purchase support after downloading fans using a product for free is a pipe dream. Here is what would happen, hell this happens with paying customers until we show them otherwise: the user would download and install the plugin. They’d encounter a problem and in our case our #1 and #2 support issues are email notifications not being sent due to server and/or DNS configuration and theme/plugin conflicts by poor code. The user would go, “This is crap.” and then deactivate and uninstall the plugin. If you think they’d go buy support at that point then you have no clue what you are talking about androbably have never done what we do. Our company wouldn’t exist if we used this business model. That’s 12 people with families who wouldn’t be making a living creating a WordPress plugin and over a million sites that wouldn’t be using our product. I can say that that with 100% confidence. As for support? Knowing what goes into supporting Gravity Forms and the larger user base that we have? Good luck to anyone who thinks they could provide high quality support for our product when they didn’t write it. I know what’s involved and the complexities of the application itself because that is what it is… An application. It’s only a plugin because that is what WordPress refers to it as when you install it. As for API keys. There is more that goes on than just updates. In the case of Gravity Forms there is going to be much more SaaS functionality that will be coming that will simply not work unless you have an API key to interact with our API. Functionality that will make the product more reliable and solve some of the primary support issues we must deal with on a daily basis caused by issues out of our control. We’re going to take control of them. SaaS is going to allow us to do so. As for sites making premium plugins and themes available for free… they are already out there. We see them all the time. Users point them out to us. Users come to used expecting support because they downloaded it from site X instead of buying it from us. It causes confusion. On top of all of this there is the issue of branding and trademarks. People seem to think that the code being GPL means the brand is GPL and you can do with it as you please. Sorry folks, that’s not the case. What happens when you use WordPress instead of WP in a domain name? They can go after your domain. Using someone else’s brand in a way they didn’t approve has legal ramifications that are outside the scope of the GPL. But that seems to be forgotten when people talk about the GPL as it relates to themes and plugins. The code within Gravity Forms may be GPL but the Gravity Forms brand most certainly is not. If you want to give someone else’s premium theme or plugin away for free or even monetize it by giving it away for free and supporting it… then fork it and make it your own. Brand it as your own. The GPL let’s you do that with the code. But those well established brands themselves? They aren’t GPL.
Carl Hancock
Bottom line from someone who’s been doing this for over 4 years now:
Gravity Forms wouldn’t exist as we know it if we didn’t have the business model that we have. In fact it probably wouldn’t exist at all.
Sure thee are WordPress businesses that survive giving away their product and only charging for support. But in every case I can think of those are small 1 and 2 man shops. How many of those are businesses with an office, employees, fully paid company benefits, and employees who love what they are doing because the business model affords them these benefits and in turn that love is passed down to the customers in the quality of the product itself.
Just like the idea that donations could sustain a plugin, the idea that enough users would purchase support after downloading fans using a product for free is a pipe dream.
Here is what would happen, hell this happens with paying customers until we show them otherwise: the user would download and install the plugin. They’d encounter a problem and in our case our #1 and #2 support issues are email notifications not being sent due to server and/or DNS configuration and theme/plugin conflicts by poor code. The user would go, “This is crap.” and then deactivate and uninstall the plugin. If you think they’d go buy support at that point then you have no clue what you are talking about androbably have never done what we do.
Our company wouldn’t exist if we used this business model. That’s 12 people with families who wouldn’t be making a living creating a WordPress plugin and over a million sites that wouldn’t be using our product. I can say that that with 100% confidence.
As for support? Knowing what goes into supporting Gravity Forms and the larger user base that we have? Good luck to anyone who thinks they could provide high quality support for our product when they didn’t write it.
I know what’s involved and the complexities of the application itself because that is what it is… An application. It’s only a plugin because that is what WordPress refers to it as when you install it.
As for API keys. There is more that goes on than just updates. In the case of Gravity Forms there is going to be much more SaaS functionality that will be coming that will simply not work unless you have an API key to interact with our API. Functionality that will make the product more reliable and solve some of the primary support issues we must deal with on a daily basis caused by issues out of our control. We’re going to take control of them. SaaS is going to allow us to do so.
As for sites making premium plugins and themes available for free… they are already out there. We see them all the time. Users point them out to us. Users come to used expecting support because they downloaded it from site X instead of buying it from us. It causes confusion.
On top of all of this there is the issue of branding and trademarks.
People seem to think that the code being GPL means the brand is GPL and you can do with it as you please. Sorry folks, that’s not the case. What happens when you use WordPress instead of WP in a domain name? They can go after your domain. Using someone else’s brand in a way they didn’t approve has legal ramifications that are outside the scope of the GPL. But that seems to be forgotten when people talk about the GPL as it relates to themes and plugins. The code within Gravity Forms may be GPL but the Gravity Forms brand most certainly is not.
If you want to give someone else’s premium theme or plugin away for free or even monetize it by giving it away for free and supporting it… then fork it and make it your own. Brand it as your own. The GPL let’s you do that with the code. But those well established brands themselves? They aren’t GPL.
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