Easy Digital Downloads Substantially Reduces Prices for Extension Passes

Pippin Williamson, founder of Easy Digital Downloads, published an apology on the company’s blog today admitting that it made a mistake in its pricing model for extension passes.

In mid-June, the company introduced a new set of pricing options or passes. The passes come with a single license that provide access to a group of extensions. The prices for each pass were as follows:

Personal Pass: $199

Extended Pass: $399

Professional Pass: $699

All Access Pass: $899

After six weeks, Williamson noticed that customers were continuing to purchase individual extensions instead of the passes.

“Our expectation and intent in creating the passes was for store owners to be able to purchase access to multiple individual extensions in a more economical way, but that’s not what happened,” he said.

“Instead, store owners continued to purchase only the individual extensions they needed because the price tags of the passes were still too high. It is clear that we made a mistake in our pass pricing, and so today we’d like to apologize for that and announce new, lower prices.”

After two weeks of testing, the prices of each pass have been significantly reduced to the following amounts:

Personal Pass: $99

Extended Pass: $199

Professional Pass: $299

All Access Pass: $499

In addition to the pricing changes, customers who purchased a pass between June 1st and August 1st are eligible for a refund. The refund is equal to the difference of the purchased price and the new price. Customers have until August 15th, to request a refund.

Customers who purchased passes before the reduction will have their renewal amounts automatically changed to the lower price.

Pricing WordPress products and services is tough and requires experimentation. There are numerous WordCamp sessions, articles, and in-depth guides on the subject but there’s not one answer that’s best for every business.

Publicly admitting to a pricing mistake is one thing, but offering refunds to try to get customers on equal footing is going the extra mile.

The company could have handled things in a way that’s not as beneficial to customers, but they chose what I think is a commendable way. Williamson’s closing statement speaks about the way he leads his company and how he makes these types of decisions.

While we are far from perfect, as this pricing mistake clearly indicates, we are dedicated to doing right by our customers. To each of you, we would like to extend our most sincere thanks for sticking with us as we work through these changes
Pippin Williamson

It’s a luxury to have business owners like Williamson in the WordPress economy.