Quite a frustrating experience

This plugin relies heavily on the paid Digital Downloads Adaptive Payments and the premium themes to satisfy the description given, so it’s appropriate I detail the theme/adaptive plugin as part of the overall review (If that’s an issue then the plugin description should be re-written to concentrate on what the plugin can do as a standalone).

You can not ‘pledge’ an amount with this plugin as it is, as a standalone download. In some sense ‘pledging’ is the essence of ‘Crowdfunding’. You can make an instant payment there and then, but not make a ‘pledge’. I’d prefer to see a different plugin description than the one provided:

“Backers” can pledge specified amounts of money towards a project…”

Any payment made will be to you, the site owner, not the campaign project owner/author. You will need to make separate arrangements as to how you then transfer the money to them.

So this is an instant payment plugin, providing instant payments to you the site owner to your Paypal account.

If you do want ‘pledges’ and that money pledged to be paid direct to the campaign author’s Paypal account, you will need to buy a further plugin at $49 (Which I did), to enable the ability of a user to pledge an amount: The Digital Downloads Adaptive Payments Plugin, which I understand is co-authored by some of the developers of this package.

Further, if you’re an average website creator with no development team you will probably need to buy a theme that can utilise some of this plugins functions. Again I chose the Fundify theme at $60; so in total approx $109 paid to have ‘pledges’ working and functional, payments to campaign authors Paypal accounts and other theme related functions.

Having established this I personally found issues I felt should have been dealt with before release and as one user commented in the support forum, were ‘clunky’. The same issues were repeated by many different users so they appeared to be known bugs.

However, the support forum runs a ‘premium’ service at a monthly fee amount:
VIP Support Monthly – $39 – 30 Days
VIP Support Yearly – $149 – 365 Days

Many times I searched for support questions but was denied access to the answers because I wasn’t a ‘premium’ member; despite having paid in total $109 for the entire product range.

I’m still continuing with the package as it cost me money, but it has been a frustrating experience. I think when a product is relatively new to the market and will have some expected issues, the forum should be available for all to read and find answers.