Some of you asked for a themes club from DevPress.com after we’ve established our presence with several more theme releases. This prompted a discussion among our team members about the future of DevPress. Discussion was short and simple. Yes, DevPress will have a club, but not a themes club, plugins included.
Details
- The club will cost $5.00 per year for all existing and to-be-released themes/plugins. Once your club membership expires, it’s $5.00 to renew.
- We don’t guarantee how many products will be released per year.
- We don’t guarantee support.
Questions and Answers
How many themes and plugins will DevPress release per year? Quality not quantity. For a group of four developers, approximately 12 themes and several plugins per year would be a good guess.
Why no guaranteed support? Other companies charge you for support, not just for products. Support is what we do naturally. No one has to make us do it. We figured charging for themes and plugins is enough. Visit the DevPress forums where we actively answer every support request.
Why not free? I would love to see DevPress move towards a free system someday. However, we all have our day jobs and families to look after. A free based service/community is not an option for us because we don’t have the funding to start up a stress-free work span of six months to a year.
Why $5, not 10, 20, or 70? There’s already a themes club at almost every price range. Other groups and companies price their themes, plugins, and/or club strategically so they can market their products, gain affiliate support, compete for users, or whatever the reason/motivation is. Here’s our motivation:
- ego
- altruism
- love for WordPress
- the need to put food on the table
Charging a premium price means we have to compete with other companies feature for feature to prove we are superior even when certain features aren’t necessary. That’s not what we want because we don’t develop our products like our competitors do.
If it’s necessary, we’d build it. If it isn’t necessary, someone else will build it and make you pay $100 for that shiny extra toy you rarely use. That’s not us.
DevPress is better because it’s simple and it does things the WordPress way. And no, we wouldn’t feel proud of a theme that has 50 to 100 different configurable options. Actually, our themes typically have less than five optional settings per theme. Yet, DevPress themes still manage to come packed with powerful features.
Take the News theme for example. It’s been downloaded more than 70,000 times. Our users love News not just because it’s simple, but because it’s powerful and your site looks better the more you use it. No other companies painstakingly ensure their themes work this way and that is why DevPress is unique.
So why follow the herd and compete when our approach is completely different?
While it may seem like $5.00 is undervaluing our efforts, our goal is not to maximize profit per customer, but to maximize total number of users.
How does this $5.00 price affects future themes and plugins by DevPress? Easy, it doesn’t. Even if we’re releasing themes for free, it has to meet our own standards first and we set our standards pretty high. Regardless of free or commercial, pick any theme by DevPress; it’s one of the best out there.
How are you going to handle existing customers? We will take $5 from each purchase and refund the rest. Existing customers are automatic club members.
Haven’t you learned from the failure of the Wpdesigner $5 themes club? Yes we have. The WPDesigner themes club had one person doing everything. The DevPress Themes and Plugins Club has four people and not just any four.
What if this club idea isn’t successful? DevPress is here to stay regardless of the result. Making themes and plugins is what we do. Even if there’s no money in it, we’d still do it. Getting paid to do what you love to do means having more time to dedicate towards it.
That’s kind of a no-brainer. :)
Interesting… I logged in, added in my transaction ID (since my paypal account is NOT the same as the email I used here) and now I get
Call to undefined function devpress_update_add_club_user()on every page. Had to log out to make this post. Can’t even get to the admin side!Yeah, I was doing a little live PHP updating. That’s a fine example of why one should never do that.
I saw that your club membership has come through though. Let me know if you’re still getting that error message.
Absolutely a no-brainer already purchased :-)
Keep up the incredible work! And yeah, DevPress is really unique your philosophy is right!
Greetinx, Dave from Germany :)
Easiest decision ever. Please offer a donate button somewhere so people can give more as they feel led : )
I’m your new club member. Love what you guys did here and wish you the best of luck.
Purchased ;)
But I have a problem I tried to upgrade my previous account and it didn’t work I think because I still cannot download the “premium” theme.
Same here, after upgrading when I click to download Visual or James Goody I’m redirected to join the Club. Nice landing page however.
Did you guys input your transaction ID into the form on this page?
I’m getting the same thing. I was a registered member, but didn’t buy visual. Now I login instead of register w/ the transaction ID, but rather fill it out after new login, and it gives the redirect to the club page when download is clicked.
Yeah I entered the transaction Id, then it says Thanks for upgrading. Some redirect on the codex page for visual and James Goody.
Yup. Same thing happened to me. I think the transaction ID doesn’t save properly.
Thanks. We’ll work on updating our script for members who are upgrading.
Can you guys try resubmitting your transaction ID to the join form if you were upgrading with a previous account? I’ve just tested some updates with an example user, which appears to be working correctly.
I’ve also opened a topic in the forums for discussing any issues with upgrading, so we can have a centralized place for debugging any issues with this.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Works now : )
Thanks for letting me know. I actually just got an email that let me know your account was successfully upgraded.
Also work now for me. Thanks
I’m in. Thanks.
Your model made no sense to me until I saw that ego and altruism were higher up on the list than putting food on the table. =P
I love fresh new ways of doing things and it seems like that’s what you guys are all about. Best of luck to you guys with this part of your adventure.
We do like to throw caution to the wind and mix it up a bit. :)
[...] 28, 20110 The quartet of WordPress developers at DevPress have announced the launch of their own DevPress Club Membership this morning. The club will include access to all the themes and plugins they develop, as well as [...]
I’m definitely going to join the club.
Just joined :)
Ehm, easiest $5 spent ever? Don’t think I’ve ever gone from “ad” to purchase this fast before. Actually I never leave it up to just the ad, which isn’t any different now, as DevPress has been ever more impressive since the “regroup”.
The purchase seems to have gone through without a hitch. Since I rushed to PayPal I forgot to sign in, so I feared I might have to make a new account, but by signing in before following the “create your account” link, I was redirected to the transaction page with the ID already inserted for me. I assume by following that link before logging in I would have still been given the option to log in with an existing account. Anyhow, no problems in sight, now gonna test Visual!
Awesome stuff guys. $5 is such a great deal :) Best wishes!
Thanks for such a low price. I’m just starting after two years having it rough as a freelance graphic-web designer. Please check out my portfolio on my website. ^^
you know what would be awesome? a WordPress developer course by Justin!
We’ve got plans for awesome stuff other than themes and plugins. We’re just taking it one step at a time right now. Keep the ideas coming.
Again.
- George (in Seinfeld)
1. Love it
2. It’s kind of a no brainer
3. I wish more people would take a look at the model. Frosty and I were just talking this morning on twitter about how the pay for a year of updates or pay per month to continue to get updates models suck and we hate them.
$5 is a non-issue and for a lifetime of upgrades and new plugins I’d pay more – especially coming from you guys. I’ll pay for quality and convenience but only when it makes sense. Others don’t… not pointing at anything in particular but if you find the tweets from this morning you’ll see lol.
Thanks guys – I’ll be joining and throwing support. Tally ho
Yeh, about the willingness to pay more; I think for a whole year of anything, $10 is the sweet spot for my impulse purchases, rare as they might be. It’s kind of “buy lunch, or make my own and enjoy a 1-year service?”
[...] all the frenzy and excitement the news of our themes and plugin club brought yesterday, we had little time to share with you our latest WordPress theme, James [...]
This sounds like being a great club.
Have just paid my membership fee.
Looking forward to an exciting twelve months – and beyond !
[...] the opening of their new $5/year theme club. New releases and support are included. Plugins too! This is a bold experiment that customers [...]
[...] NO GUARANTEE Business Model SO DEV Press recently announced that they will start a club for 5 bucks a year but that there are no guarantees of how many [...]
how do i remove widget area from “News” template … I tried to make a custom page but it isn’t working.
for support, please go to the forums.