I’ve just had another very poor licensing experience with independent software. It’s encouraged me to share some general guidelines on how to license open source software.
Introducing The Newsletter Plugin
We’ve used something called The Newsletter Plugin for about eight years now. It used to be run by a very personable guy called Stefano Lissa ak.a. Satollo. Stefano is a renaissance man/genius who created about ten complex plugins in a few years, including The Newsletter Plugin (HyperCache was very different but another exquisite piece of code). At one point, The Newsletter Plugin interface was state of the art for the WordPress world. Over the years, its interface has started to age badly, all dark and with too many buttons and too many options. The switch between HTML editor and WYSIWYG editor is unreliable. It’s pretty slow moving from screen to screen as it uses all the WordPress admin code plus its own.
After recently testing the even slower and buggy MailPoet, we’re no longer sold on the benefits of including newsletter technology in the WordPress back-end. Most WordPress newsletter plugins don’t even use the existing WordPress groups. You have to manage your groups separately and import them from the main WordPress database. It’s easier to manage the groups on the same server and from within the same database. Still subscriber management is not much harder to do remotely via API, if there were some decent lightweight and affordable external mail software.*
We’re now experimenting with Sendy which is all that. A light interface, very fast and a one time license fee.
Breaking the Commandments of Software Licensing
The Newsletter Plugin breaks about three or four commandments of licensing. On March 31 and April 17, Michael Travan at The Newsletter plugin sent out an offer to renew our licenses for 50% off. My colleague Natalia Klenovska encouraged me to take them up on it to make sure that our license didn’t expire to provide a smooth transition. The Newsletter Plugin puts up ugly red expired notices in the WordPress admin section otherwise.
If you’re receiving this, it means that your Newsletter premium plan is going to expire soon. Luckily enough, we’re applying an unbelievable 50% off on all our yearly licenses and it’s available to all renewals purchased before the end of April ?
By renewing now you will retain access to all our professional addons and integrations, and you will also get another full year of premium support.
So I logged in and renewed our license for €48.
The special offer as written
What did the guys at The Newsletter plugin do?
They created a new license for our account!
Now we have to manage two licenses and suffer even more renewal notices!
They charged us 50% off but that’s 50% off a new license! So we paid €48 instead of €35. I don’t mind the €13 at all but I do mind the bait and switch. And I particularly mind that I have to deal with two licenses now.
What’s worse is that despite the clear language of their promotional email, The Newsletter support page offers this gem:
HOW TO RENEW
If you wish to renew your license for another year, you will find a renew button inside your account page 5 days before current license expiration.
During special sales, you can buy a discounted license but it will not add up to your current license and it it will expire after 12 months.
Support says something completely different than marketing
I’m left with a lot of questions.
- Why does a customer need special instructions to renew?
- Why does a renewal have to be done within 5 days before current license expires?
- Why are special sales only reserved for new customers?
- Why do The Newsletter Plugin publishers want to confuse customers?
Why so complicated?
The simple answer is that The Newsletter Plugin publishers are Italian. The Italian bureaucracy, Italian mafia and Italian chaos are well-known. Over fifteen years, our second most problematic group of customers outside of fraudsters in Brazil, Nigeria and Russia are the Italians. Many Italians just don’t seem to be able to do business in an orderly, systematic and courteous way. Italy is definitely not in the Germanic part of Europe.
From Slovakia, in the heart of the old Hapsburg Empire, we enjoy a splendid compromise between Austrian efficiency and Slavic nonchalance. Amusingly enough, the Germans find Austrians horribly disorganised: the German CEO of Nord Seafood complained to me at a ballet showing in Vienna some years ago about horrific it is trying to instil order and discipline among his Austrian colleagues. In the end, it turns out order is just what you are used to.
Astonishing though how the original barbarians have become far better organised than the original Romans.
What The Newsletter Plugin should do to improve licensing
Although the list is long of changes which should be made, none of them are difficult and all are common sense.
One. Renewals should always be license extensions, not parallel licenses. Users should never be penalised for early renewal.
Two. License keys should not be replaced but the same license key should remain in use with new expiry dates.
The Newsletter does have “universal license keys” which do behave like this. It creates absolute havoc and confusion for customers to have two license keys to manage, one of which expires and the other which doesn’t. Absolutely Byzantine. Italy is in the Western Empire so I don’t understand why they are following the rules of Constantinople.
Three. Sale prices should be on renewal prices, not on bought as new prices. There is a horrible tendency in the unicorn economy to offer one price to new users (new eyeballs) and existing users. Treating new users better than existing users is a sure-fire recipe for customer dissatisfaction.
Uber, Airbnb, Audible (Amazon), Tidal, Cloudapp and many others play this game. They are playing with fire long-term and encouraging customers to jump from provider to provider. The game for the smaller unicorns is to obtain the maximum number of eyeballs or paying users to encourage an expensive acquisition. This is a contemptible and unsustainable business model.
In passing, it’s worth noting that the donation model is even less sustainable than promotional pricing.
Treat your customers fairly. Existing customers should always have access to the same offers which new customers enjoy. If your offers for new customers are so good that you can’t make the same offer to your existing customers, maybe you shouldn’t be making the offer at all. Despite the VC breathing on your neck about velocity.
Whether to make a profit on sales or not is a deep argument though between those who believe in puffing up user numbers for resale and those who believe in building a sustainable business from the beginning. If you don’t have VC money in your company and you’re not seeking a quick exit, price for sustainability.
The Newsletter Plugin publishers would save enough in support tickets by eliminating these misunderstanding to make up for any ill-gotten gains. This is before adding the additional goodwill and absence of ill-will, they would save by following these rules.
What do to about The Newsletter plugin?
The Newsletter Plugin is not bad software (even if the user interface continues to slowly atrophy against contemporary benchmarks). We wouldn’t have used it/licensed it for eight years if it was. I sincerely hope they sort out their licensing sometime soon. The software itself is terrific value, enabling publishers to avoid heavy monthly licensing fees for maintaining large subscriber lists.
We license too much software to go through these kinds of hoops every year for every piece of software we use. There’s strong pressure on us now to find a lower hassle alternative.
Scoring FV Player against Foliovision’s own pricing rules
The product we have on the market with a large userbase and many renewals is FV Player and its addons.
One. Renewals should always be license extensions, not parallel licenses. Users should never be penalised for early renewal.
5/5. We offer customers a very low renewal prices (about one third of new price) for customers who keep their support and update access up to date so renewing customers always get the lowest possible price. We do plan to increase continuous renewal price to 50% off soon as the discount is probably too steep. Non-continual renewal will only get a 20% discount in the future, as we’ve found that maintenance for a video plugin with yearly new major versions of iOS, Android, Mac and Windows is bigger investment of time than we originally though.
Any renewal can be made at any time and will always extend your license.
Two. License keys should not be replaced but the same license key should remain in use with new expiry dates.
3.5/5. When a customer licenses FV Player, s/he only needs to add his or her domain and the license is permanently in his or her account. There is no longer even a need for license keys. The licensing is fully automatic with no need for manual user intervention. We spent a lot of time on cutting down hassle for our users and are very happy to have been able to create such a low friction system for our users.
The current downside is that we must charge a small fee to change a domain in order to discourage piracy. We are working on making that easier (we need to add some limitations on changing domains but it’s kind of a separate project). Definitely something for us to work on too!
Three. Sale prices should be on renewal prices, not on bought as new prices…. If your offers for new customers are so good that you can’t make the same offer to your existing customers, maybe you shouldn’t be making the offer at all.
4.5/5. If anything, we’ve priced too generously. The idea for us at the beginning was to democratise video publishing: to give smaller publishers the same tools which larger publishers enjoy.
YouTube may be free but right from the beginning I didn’t trust YouTube’s potential censorship. Vimeo is also next to free, but Vimeo has been knee-capping customers right from the beginning (I remember one real estate client’s videos simply disappearing overnight ten years ago with no offer to host at pro prices at the time). There are many publishers who are much better served by hosting their own videos on their own domains, regardless of the CDN which they use in the background to manage video’s bandwidth demands.
It is my sincere hope that licensing will get easier across the software space. Right now my biggest motivation reason not to buy software is to avoid the inevitable and often horrific license maintenance. At Foliovision, we’ll continue to strive to put the licensing burden on us and not on our customers.
- Mailpoet’s built-in templates are a little bit better but Mailpoet’s constant attempts to upsell users to their own SMTP service are extremely tedious. Out of the two, we figured there was little benefit to MailPoet unless a publisher likes to send automated new post alert emails to a subscriber list. We wouldn’t recommend automated sends anyway: there are certain to be mistakes and broken links not to mention email fatigue. The Newsletter Plugin is the better choice for a publisher intent on keeping his or her newsletter software within WordPress.
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.
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