Hey Jeff (@specialk),
Thank you for reaching out. EDD prices have not increased for any Pro customer with an active license. We actually lowered our pricing plans to make EDD more affordable. In the past, EDD Stripe Pro and all other extensions were sold a-la carte. Software extensions for recurring billing, software licensing, etc would cost $99 – $199 for each extension. We made our pricing more inclusive and now recurring payments + Stripe Pro and dozens of other extensions are available for $199 total. Also our Pro plan which includes software licensing, Stripe Pro, and many more extensions is available for $299 / yr. When you have an active license, there are no extra Stripe application fees on any transaction.
Our goal is to continue delivering more value and I believe the team have done a great job with that.
To support the development of our free users and the support / updates that come with that, we added a 2% application fee a few years back. Since then our team has invested countless hours to improve the EDD free version (notably the big 3.0 release) as well as keeping up with all the new Stripe features to help increase conversion rates including the Payment Elements and compliance with various financial regulations that have changed around the world to ensure payments are never disrupted.
In order to ensure that we have a sustainable business model, which allows us to continue reinvesting in our free plugin, we have increased our Stripe application fee from 2% to 3%. This fee only applies to free users. You can remove this fee by upgrading to our Extended Pass or higher and installing Easy Digital Downloads (Pro). Many of our users upgrade to Pro to support our development since EDD powers such a critical part of their business.
We are very thoughtful in the decisions we make around pricing to ensure that EDD remains inclusive, so as many people can use it to sell digital products online. I can say with great confidence that there’s no other solution in the market that’s offering the value that EDD does at the prices we do.
Comparable solutions in WooCommerce — just Software Licensing Addon ($129) and Recurring payment Subscriptions addon ($239 / yr) — would cost $368. That’s not including the other features one needs to run a successful store. The cost of running a similar setup on WooCommerce would exceed well above $2,000 / yr.
Freemius, another solution in the market, charges a 27% fee when you start and at the lowest still costs 7% of any transaction (that’s on top of Stripe or other gateway fees).
Gumroad charges their users 10% and Memberful also has a same 10% fee on free users (and even their Pro users have a 4.9% fee.
Our goal is to continue to keeping EDD affordable for everyone while ensuring that we can reinvest in the product and our team.
I appreciate your continued support ??
