In reply to Michael Edwin.

I get where you're coming from, but I wouldn't say it's just for the whales ... it's for anyone who finds $360/yr in value for what the product offers. And, sure, that definitely won't be an enormous group to right now. But as we add to the subscription, our intent is to make the value of the subscription worth the price for a larger and larger group of people.

But I want to stress that we absolutely do not ever expect this to be some sort of universally appealing offering. It is called Genesis PRO for a reason. If you're a professional web developer invested in WordPress, we want to help save you time when building sites for yourself and your clients.

For people who aren't necessarily professional web developers, or who don't have the budget for our subscription, I want to reiterate that we are dedicating significant resources to building out FREE, no cost, totally gratis tools that do what our current flagship commercial product does, AND MORE! If someone never buys Genesis Pro, our Genesis products will still be available to them.

I can tell you don't like Genesis. I'm cool with that ... to each his own. But we really are trying to position our product strategy so that we're able to offer as much as we can for free. I mean, Genesis has always been a commercial product, and the StudioPress Pro Plus package is $500 currently, and still sells really well. The strategy of getting Genesis-quality tools in the hands of even more people for free seems like a good thing. ¯¯_(ツ)_/¯

As you say, though, the market will decide.