@imtanuki – Hmm, Definitely sounds like you are missing something.
I’m not sure why the “top-rated” popup plugin hasn’t been tested against 4.9.
Has been tested on v4.9 alpha, beta and RC for several months and works great.
Why isn’t there sth more than a short-code editor to build popup windows? Other popup plugins have WYSIWYG editors…
Your definitely missing something. Try the Popup Maker admin menu item -> Add Popup. Complete WYSIWIG editor, conditions manager, visual theme builder with live previews etc. Check out our docs and blog, the latest post specifically has screenshots of these things.
there may not be a material correlation between the vendor’s web site and the plugin functionality / quality…but the web site looks like it was designed quite a while ago. I didn’t even see any evidence that the vendor uses their own plugin.
Website is just over 4 weeks old, so I’m not sure what you mean there. Also we have weekly new content by multiple established authors, use exit intent in various ways throughout the blog and have some other small integrations. We don’t think our site should be popups everywhere just because that’s the product we sell. That would annoy our users in the same way we try to help you not annoy yours.
That said we use popups in several places normally where we are currently testing a new plugin we have available such as cart abandonment, bundle upgrade offers etc.
If the extensions have robust integration, there clearly is some premium value…but when my theme vendor bundles Visual Composer, multiple sliders, contact forms and other plugins into a fairly integrated dev environment for $50 to $60, or when Duplicator provides a comprehensive migration tool in its freemium package, I’m struggling to understand why the premium bundle for this plugin is $150…
You obviously are looking at it from a how much can I save perspective. Try looking at it from the value delivered. I mean if your business revolves around capturing leads or converting visitors, then exit intent, mailchimp integrations and analytics could be worth thousands of dollars to you a month. In which case we are undercharging no? Also consider the time it would take you to implement a simple popup manually. A couple hours at minimum, at $50/hour works out to $100+ in dev time saved etc.
IDK…seems like the WP plugin market is way out of whack.
In my honest opinion, the WP plugin market is just getting where it should be. The user base on the other hand still thinks that just because it’s open source everything should be free or cheap. In this case I have a full time support staff on payroll, how would you suppose I pay for that if we offered it all for no money. We wouldn’t and then you wouldn’t have premium free options which this plugin is (though you seemed to have missed it somehow). That said we provide support for free & paid users just the same, always have, always will. This is at a huge cost to us. Just one more thing to consider that we deal with just under 1k tickets a month.
As or the $60 themes, your perspective is again tainted by sites like Envato/CodeCanyon. You may not know this but authors didn’t set the prices on there until just recently. So a $60 lifetime theme price was set by some guy who had no clue what it actually took to build, maintain & support that code. Basically a monkey throwing crap (prices) at a wall. If the authors could have set prices you would have seen a drastically different pricing scheme everywhere. Furthermore there are a few gems in the rough on Envato and they usually climb to the top, but 90%+ of the code quality there is crap. That again is due to the culture envato created by setting prices so low and not requiring renewals, which pushed authors to simply create new products rather than continuously improving old ones. Again not all authors but a huge portion of whats available unfortunately.
I’m not sure you would ever see a company or individual outside the WP plugin/theme ecosystem that would invest the time needed to make a quality product if they had to deal with the mindset we see today. Nobody would start a business on the premise of giving away all of their efforts and continuous customer support for a good reputation.
So in short, if you want quality which it seems you do, then don’t be afraid to pay for it. We spend over $3k/year in premium plugins and they make our lives so much easier by saving us time, adding new features we don’t have manpower to create ourselves, fixing issues in a timely fashion and answering our support needs when they arise. In any other industry that would require support contracts or enterprise level plans & constant upgrade fees. I know because that is how the PC software industries work, did healthcare IT for 8 years, followed by Web design for businesses (6 years) that could never have survived on anything like the WP markets.
I hope you’ll take another look in your admin as it sounds like you completely missed the bulk of the plugins functionality. In fact the [popup] shortcode is drepracated and due to be hidden in the next version as we simply do not recommend using it over the popup post type editor.
If you do I hope you will reconsider your review.
Take care.
