When we launched almost five years ago, we were one of the first theme shops to embrace a sustainable business model by charging a yearly renewal fee for ongoing updates and support. At that time, we decided to offer a very aggressive renewal discount of 50% which has remained in place until today. Theme and plugin development has become more involved over the years and, as such, we feel that a renewal discount this deep is no longer sustainable.
Updated Renewal Pricing
You will now receive a 30% discount upon renewing a license (with the exception of subscriptions created before today, which are locked in at 50%). This will help us to continue to serve you in the years to come. A typical renewal rate for independent theme and plugin shops ranges from 0% (full price) to 50%. Offering 30% puts us square in the middle of what has been considered common.
We have made several pricing changes in the past and they have always been well received so we are assuming that that will be the case with this change to the renewal discount. But, if you have any questions or concerns about this, please get in touch with us. We want to hear from you.
Moving Towards Plans
We have hinted about a new add-on called Church Content Pro. We’re working at wrapping it up and will release it at the same time that we switch to plan-based pricing. With these new annual plans, you will receive access to all themes in order to make trying them and switching to a new release easier. A higher plan will include all themes plus the Pro plugin. This will allow us to offer more value while further simplifying purchasing and renewals.
If you are an existing license holder, you will be able to continue to renew it per the existing pricing. If ever you wanted to switch to one of our new plans to get access to all themes and the Pro plugin, then you’ll be able to do so at a discount that considers how much value is left on your individual theme license.
Stay tuned for more updates on the Pro plugin and the upcoming plans.
2 Comments
Like you, we were previously offering 50% discount for one of our plugin at the beginning. Before we totally removed it, we decreased to 25% and discovered via survey the discount wasn’t even the enticement buyers needed to renew.
Great move Steven and team.
Thanks for the encouragement. I guess we’re on a similar path since we’ll go 100% on renewal for our bundled plans when we introduce them. I think most plugin and theme sellers will see that they need to operate as businesses outside of the WordPress world do. You know we’ve tended to be creators first then business people second, but the industry is maturing (as they say). It’s amazing that WordPress is 15 years old now.
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