Promising …but not for me.

  • Neilisin

    (@neilisin)


    6 years ago

    While exploring invoicing options for my freelance business, this package looked good from the outset being that it is free and works well on WordPress and is fairly lightweight in terms of server load and queries. It’s fairly configurable and an all round good product.

    However, I was not enchanted by the free-but-not-free guise this product poses under. [it’s like shareware from the 1990s] If you actually want to use it for real-world invoicing purposes you’re going to have to buy it, and each additional feature for payment seems to be at a cost, which is fair if you require it, but I found this extinguished my enthusiasm rather than sparked my interest.

    It was more than I need or want and certainly not at a price I am able to stretch to for the scale of business and turnover I make.

    I’ll take a non-wordpress based {selfhosted} product for my invoicing.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Dan Cameron

    (@dancameron)

    Hi Neilisin,

    I’m truly sorry you feel that way. Hopefully I can provide some insight to help you understand our decisions since it sounds like there’s some misunderstandings.

    Providing a free version of a WordPress plugin that offers a “premium” or “pro” version is extremely common. It’s the business model that has allowed so many WordPress plugins to strive, and is the only reason we have so many awesome feature rich plugins for our WordPress sites. To be honest our businesses couldn’t sustain maintaining a free plugin without a paid version, trust me I’ve tried, and after 14+ years of experience in the WordPress no one has found a better option for users.

    On top of all that development time we spend on the free version of Sprout Invoices we pride ourselves on providing superior support. If you (or anyone else) were to need help with the customizations of the free version you could always ask, we’re a bit limited compared to the support we provide for paying customers but you might be surprised.

    I hope you understand we’re not trying to push you away from using the free version. We have thousands of happy users.

    If there’s anything we can do to help please let me know.

    Thread Starter Neilisin

    (@neilisin)

    I totally understand that! I also try to work for a living ??

    I would have been happier to pay $10 / $20 for a half-way functional product than plant myself between a rock and a hard place between the non-working free version vs bells and whistles more-than-I-am-able-to-deliver functionality.

    Keep up the good work but this could have been a much better experience for a lowly user like myself. I am by no means objecting to how you do what you do, it simply doesn’t work for me or poor folk like me.

    Plugin Contributor Dan Cameron

    (@dancameron)

    Thank you for understanding. However I’m a bit perplexed by “non-working free version” since I’m not aware of any support requests that you created, and we don’t have any open bugs/tickets that are attributed to the free version.

    If you could let me know more here or via email I’d appreciate it. I’d like to provide a fully functional free version.

    Cheers!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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