I recently received an email about our FV Player Pro plugin licensing and pricing. filmmaker Paul Moon‘s questions were good ones. Here are my answers.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your email and your questions. I’m delighted to answer your questions.
I am very bothered by what appears to be a surprise limitation on my purchase: https://prnt.sc/gerwa6. That is a screenshot of my license upon purchasing FV Player Pro. THERE IS NO PLACE ON YOUR WEBSITE CLARIFYING A LIMITATION ON MY LICENSE. For you to add this only after I paid, is unacceptable. I’d like to understand what happened. A product is completely worthless when it expires after 1 year.
Your license never expires. You can continue to use the last version indefinitely forever. The main sales page clearly states: ”All updates and support free for 1 year.”
It is no solution to that policy that my version number will keep working. A product ceases to work without important updates that keep the product compatible with changing characteristics of services like Vimeo and WordPress.
This is exactly why we cannot provide updates forever. The video landscape is changing so often and frequently that unlike some ecommerce providers who don’t change many of extensions for years and charge hundreds of dollars per extension (WooCommerce and EDD – Easy Digital Downloads), we are working non-stop almost every day on improvements and maintenance issues for FV Player.
I strongly dislike “bait-and-switch” tactics that penalize those who actually send you money (I consider $75 to a be large expense for a WordPress plug-in).
I hate bait and switch tactics as well. Large expense: I both agree and disagree. $75 is not cheap, I fully agree. I’d like to lower the price and strive to do so. We’ll probably break some new features out into extensions which have specific use cases (say pay per view) and I’m going to look closely at lowering the price of core.
Yet, yet, yet – to have access to the features, preferences, capabilities and constant upgrades of a plugin as sophisticated as FV Player Pro for $75 is pretty awesome. If someone tried to custom code just a small part of what FV Player Pro does on the typical website, it would be thousands and thousands of dollars and still not work right.
Thanks for being part of Foliovision!
Making the web work for you, Alec
Is $75 too much money for a video plugin or too low a price or just right? There’s a free FV Player Pro license for the best answer to that question in the next month.
PS. If you already have a license, I will be happy to extend your license for an additional year.
You can see many of H. Paul Moon’s films at Zen Violence Films. Among other subjects, Paul creates dance films, a subject close to my heart. His equipment review site is FocusPulling.com.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
Yes, it’s too much.
It is a mental thing as much as anything else. It is priced far above the market norm for such a plugin. Now it might do much more than average so the developer thinks that justifies it but it still seems too expensive.
There is a good deal of research about pricing, and by being so far above the norm you cut off a lot of potential sales. App developers have found that cutting an app from $9.99 to $4.99 can more than double sales. Thereby making more money overall than if the price had remained too high.
I would also suggest that perhaps the developer has included too much functionality. Some of the much more advanced features could be put into an “add-on” or pro level that you charge extra for. So then you could offer the base plugin for less and add Amazon S3 support (and/or other things) for a little extra. Or something like that.
I plan to charge over $100 for my plugin … it’s really a matter of how much benefit user (buyer) gets from your plugin. If there are similar tools on market that cost say $15, and they are more popular – you have a very hard uphill battle. However, since most people don’t know about alternatives, you can run smart ad campaigns and still sell it at $75 or more … just build value. If you have no competition (in terms of benefits to cost ratio) than you can charge even more. How do you market? I’m in marketing/launch stage myself now.
Hi levchikb,
thanks for sharing your strategy with us. It really does matter how useful the product is to the user. What kind of a plugin do you have?
Cheers, Sanela
I have a plugin that costs $1270 and one that costs $27 and they are both priced correctly for the value they give to customers. It depends how much the plugin enables them to make as a ROI.
Hi Martin, I think you meant to say $127? $1270 sounds like a lot of money for a plugin.
Way overpriced. If you are asking if the price is too much I assume you are not getting the sales you expected. it’s not really that its overpriced as a whole, more so the barrier of entry should be lower priced (with fewer features if required.)
Your product includes a lot of functionality which may not be needed by most users. Where others have spread their product out across extensions, yours seems to be bundled into fewer products which makes it difficult to account paying for features that may not be needed. Your site has an extensive list that makes me question the quality of each feature. You might have a quality product but anytime I see something that requires I gamble a significant amount for the entry fee and the majority of features are behind a paywall makes me question the products true value. I bought plugins for several hundred dollars and each one was a complete waste of money. The plugins which I’ve found to be marketed correctly have a low cost of entry with add-ons to extend in any direction.
Hi Daniel,
thank you for your feedback! Good point about having a lower priced entry-point with fewer features, that makes a lot of sense. Cheers, Sanela
I would say in the ballpark of $40-$60 per its feature set. If the plugin is unique, then sure, you can charge a bit more. I am not familiar with Foliovision, but if there are other plugins of similar features I would use their pricing as a guide so as to be competitive.