Meztli said

I had a similar experience. The support never impressed me, actually quite the opposit from time to time. Especially if i compare to other wordpress related services as for example Elegant Themes, that i have subscribed to for the last 4 years. So if you want to this pay model to get successful, you really need to improve your support a notch or two.

 

Are you sure that you are saying that Simple press doesn’t have good support on the forums because I, and almost 99% of the people here, are great fans of the simple press support.I think Simple press has probably one of the best, if not the best, support out there. The approximate time in which Andy or Steve have replied to most of my posts here has been 10 hours which can’t better anywhere. 

Andy even went out of his way to resolve the jquery conflict on my website. I sent him the zip folder of my theme and he resolved the entire problem. So I love the support here the most apart from obviously the plugin.

I was a little surprised initially as I had been a very active forum member who just had a few weeks away. So my knee jerk reaction was ‘WHAAAATTTT!’. Then I thought about the fantastic support that I have always received on this forum and how with Steve and Andy’s tireless help and tolerance I have managed to somehow get my forum looking spot on. Over time the tweaks will continue and the forum will evolve and they will hopefully still be there.

The idea of loosing their support does not bear thinking about!

So in saying that I suggest that they should have

• Some form of ‘taster’ membership for new users
• Short term membership, maybe even as short as a week
• The annual fee is a little high I think something like $60 would be more appropriate

Of course the short term memberships could easily offset the reduced annual fee. Whatever happens I am more than happy to continue supporting the guys with this wonderful piece of work.

Thanks again

Conrad

mann said  

Are you sure that you are saying that Simple press doesn’t have good support on the forums because I, and almost 99% of the people here, are great fans of the simple press support.I think Simple press has probably one of the best, if not the best, support out there. The approximate time in which Andy or Steve have replied to most of my posts here has been 10 hours which can’t better anywhere. 

Andy even went out of his way to resolve the jquery conflict on my website. I sent him the zip folder of my theme and he resolved the entire problem. So I love the support here the most apart from obviously the plugin.

I am happy that you experienced great support from Simple:press. However that does not change the fact that my experience has been different from yours.

I think that it is fair to say that people’s experiences will differ.

There can be several reasons for this.

• Forum culture – often people will migrate from one forum to another and expect things to be same. They never are, a little time spent seeing how things are done and exhibiting some humility never hurts.
• A free support forum must have been severely oversubscribed and with 2 people, it is inevitable that some would not receive consistency.
• Regulars will always be treat with a little favouritism, it is human nature. While I am sure Andy and Steve try their hardest to be even handed they will fail have inevitably failed here from time to time.
• Politeness really helps – antagonism and criticism for the sake of it never gets people far in my experience.

So that was how it used to be but now its a pay model and items 2 and 3 will probably change, items 1 & 4 will stay the same.

Just my (worthless) observations.

Conrad

I think the support and continuing development of this plugin are more than worth the membership cost.  In fact I just decided to buy a gold membership, to upgrade from my silver.  People who work this hard need the support of all of us who benefit from that work!

Amen Joseph

I wanted to weigh in on this discussion.

Firstly, I believe completely that these guys deserve to be paid for all the work they put into this plugin, in fact I’ve donated myself on several occasions as I’ve been able to ($ are not always freely available or I would have done so even more).

I’d love to see a cheaper membership option that allows you to view but not respond to posts, a lot of the time I like to be able to see if other people are even having the same issues as I am.

Sometimes people have issues that can be fixed in a matter of seconds if the information is made available to them and having to pay a large amount for something like that can be rather off-putting.

It would have also been nice to see some kind of discount offered for those of us who voluntarily donated multiple times in the past 🙂

I still believe that you should keep everything as is but add a $5 day pass and for new users read-only for a month. The month will get them set up well enough to get hooked. The day pass will help people them solve their problems and might open their eyes to a longer membership. I believe it would be a win win for you guys, and we know you deserve to earn some good money for all you great work.

Hi Guys,

We have paid because we appreciate the hard work and how good and ‘simple’ the plugin is when installed.

We didn’t expect too much, but what the plugin does with the $39 membership is definitely value for money.

You should consider some video clips to show people what they can get for the $39…

The extra plugins are great and you appreciate them when installed

Good luck.

thanks for the kind words!

lol, need to change the title of this topic… (but of course, won’t)…

Meztli said The support never impressed me, actually quite the opposit from time to time.

Above comment is not true any longer.

Andy and Steve showed me wrong at so many occasions last four months, that it´s silly. Simply put, you wont get better support anywhere, they rock.

Well thank you. That is generous.

I wish you guys would go back to the free model.  As a matter of fact, I wish you would just build my website for me.  No wait….I want you to host it for me, too… and pay for the domain name.  While you’re at it, can you also populate the information and deposit money into my bank account.

Geeze, I don’t think that’s to much to expect!  Oh, yea….and I want you to do that for all ????? of your customers, but make me the most important!!

OK, obviously I’m being facetious!!!  I’ve just jumped in head first to this whole web development and have quickly found that you get what you pay for!  So far, I feel like I’ve gotten AMAZING help!  I don’t have a problem paying for the help that I’ve gotten!  I’ve read through a lot of these topics and see them helping with issues that other plugins would simply say…. It’s “XXXXXX’s” problem.  I’ve seen it over and over….sarcastic and unhelpful responses in other forums (paid), but not here…at least not the ones I’ve read!

Thank you for a great product and superior service!!

Now…about those deposits!!  

Well you brightened up my evening Thank you.

The one that really got to me was the guy who sent us quite an insulting email – full of vitriol – and when I went to his site it turned out that he had a membership plugin active and you had to pay for his content! I was stricken dumb!

Simple press is not just a forum plugin.
Its a full functional and sophisticated forum for WP
Actually its the only solution for WP
You work hard for this and you deserve money.
My site is new and I don’t have incomes yet but I paid for it because I was impressed of its simplicity and its professional settings.
You really feel powerful as admin when you have simple press!!
Congrats!