Why We’re not Going to Offer any More Lifetime Accounts for Toolset

   Amir

Announcements

April 23, 2018
70

We recently changed the accounts system for Toolset, effectively stopping to sell new Lifetime accounts and upgrades from existing accounts to Lifetime. This change brought a lot of concerns, which I’d like to address in this post.

First, we understand that now Toolset costs more. We raised the cost of yearly renewals and we removed the very lucrative option for Lifetime accounts. Effectively, these two changes increase the cost of using Toolset and make it a less valuable offer. Meaning, we need to justify the additional cost with additional value.

We understand that it’s frustrating

When you bought Toolset, our site said that you will be able to later upgrade to a Lifetime account. We repeated that in follow-up emails. Later, we announced (not prominently enough) that this option is going away and then it went away.

Some of the clients who were on yearly accounts had already set-up their automatic renewals (like we hoped). Some of the clients didn’t and some asked for a refund for everything that they paid us (and we gave these refunds).

We’ve building stuff for a long time now. We also buy things and we use them and we’ve been in similar situations before. We used stuff and it changed on us. Sometimes, a paid product that we used vanished. Sometimes a free project that we relied on got abandoned and in other cases paid products that we used saw a huge pricing bump (yes, we use paid WooCommerce extensions).

So, I can say with certainty that we feel what you’re feeling and we know what you’re talking about. Our problem is not about understanding but about deciding what’s best for us to do.

Lifetime accounts are the same as Free accounts

This is something that we’ve had to learn the hard way. When you need to pay salaries and other expenses for a big project, this lesson can be a painful one. Nonetheless, it’s an important lesson that we eventually learned.

When we sell Lifetime accounts, we build the foundation of an unsustainable business. This sort of business will eventually collapse. It’s more a question of time than a matter of “if”.

Toolset is a support-intensive product

Toolset is like a Swiss-knife, which you can use for many purposes. As such, it will always need a lot of support. That support is also pretty advanced. Toolset support team, besides taking support questions, needs to invest considerable time training constantly. If you’ve used our support before, you know what I’m talking about.

At this moment, if we invite all clients with existing yearly accounts to upgrade to Lifetime accounts, we’re more or less guaranteeing the end of the project within two years. So, ironically, you’ll be paying for a Lifetime account and only getting to use the plugins for the next two years. Not to mention the huge mess that you’ll have dealing with client sites that use abandoned plugins.

Of course, the best option is if we could offer a Lifetime account just for you and other clients will pay the cost of yearly support and development. I hope you can see the conflict in this idea.

The choice that we took

Everyone working on Toolset team is above the age of 18, so we’re responsible for our actions. We had to choose something. Not choosing anything is also a choice and will come with consequences.

We chose to:

  • Increase the price of Toolset
  • Increase its value
  • Take the heat

The price increase means that we’ll be asking from anyone who wants to keep using Toolset (and didn’t previously buy a Lifetime account), to pay for getting updates and support.

If you’ve been following our blog and newsletters, you may be familiar with the increase in value. If not, we’re very close (2-3 weeks) from releasing a major version that took over a year to develop. This new version dramatically improves what you can do with Toolset and the convenience in using Toolset. More major work is coming in the next few months.

And I’m here to take the heat. As the founder of the company, I’m responsible for this sort of decisions. Our support and development teams are doing their very best to make Toolset great for you. These sort of painful and unpopular decisions, I reserve for myself.

How we can make it right for you

We’re not going to offer Lifetime accounts anymore, which means that Toolset will end up costing more. The only way we can compensate you for it, is by making Toolset more valuable. If you can use the same plugins that you’re already paying for, to build more sites, the cost per site stays the same or even goes down.

Tell us what we can do, so you will want to use Toolset for more sites. Our entire development and support team is eager to know what we can do to make up for this pricing increase.

 

Comments 70 Responses

  1. I started to experiment with Toolset quite a while ago and experienced how it became better and more user friendly with every release.

    Specially after trying the beta version of the next release with a better pagebuilder integration, many to many relationships and other improvements it starts to become the tool of choice for building responsive sites and webapps on top of WordPress.

    Also the support offered is far above the average and done by people who know what they are doing. Thanks for that. 🙂

    The two things that would be on my wish-list to add a better value are:

    – bringing CRED to par with other formbuilders
    While making forms in CRED works fine, it would be nice to have a more intuitive usable drag and drop formbuilder.

    – Strong Password enforcement for User Forms
    This would make it unnecessary to use other plugins for frontend registration, password recovery and login.

    I think then more people would say: why do I need to pay a subscription for a form builder if I can do this as fast and easy in Toolset and even more.

    • I agree to Peter’s comments.

      Toolset is really helpful for custom wp applications and the support is good.

      – But “CRED” needs improvement.
      – And also the Memory management.

      • Actually, our next project for CRED is to make it a lot more useful for general forms applications. Can you tell us what you’re missing in CRED today?

          • Also as a Feature Request:

            – Please add some Visual CSS customization Feature for Toolset.
            So I can develop custom website along with front-end design for those elements.
            or
            – Drag and Drop Design elements for Toolset customization.

            • For these, we’re waiting for Gutenberg. So far, Toolset integration with Gutenberg is going great! We have blocks for Views, CRED and now custom fields.

              We hope that Gutenberg will become the editor of choice for many people using WordPress. Then, we’re pretty sure that most themes will be fully integrated with it. We hope that Gutenberg will be the visual editor for WordPress, including for Toolset. We’ll use that to design templates, forms, archives and everything else visual.

              It’s taking a little longer and Gutenberg is still getting a lot of negative press, but the code is really great and the dev team is a pleasure to work with. We have high hopes for the project.

    • Hi Peter. Can you tell me what specifically you’re missing in CRED? We have our own plans for improvements in CRED in the very near future. I want to make sure that we’re not overlooking something big.

      • Hi Amir

        Imho the functionality CRED offers so far (in the stable version), copes with everything I needed it for, but those are relative “simple” forms without a lot of bells and whistles. Tbh, in a way i even like the present purist approach.

        But it would be nice to have a bit more visual form builder specially for new users, to make it easier to build the basic responsive form layouts.

        Something simple like: add a row, use full row or split it into 2-, 3-, 4 columns and then adding the required fields int the places and then add another row and so on.

        It also should be possible to add then custom CSS classes to all the elements or even nicer would be a possibility to build styles which could be imported/exported.

        Another feature which might be appreciated but would be really just a nice to have option is a math captcha for those who don’t like the google captchas or other external spam filters.

        I take that user forms are counted into your reply too 🙂

        The present version of User Forms I strictly don’t use because of the lack of a strong password enforcement.

        Allowing weak Passwords or sending passwords in plain text via e-mail should be a thing of the past and wont be allowed to use by many customers in business, education and government environments.

        This would also help to make the web a safer place, at least when the sites are built with Toolset.

        • peterS-14’s requirement for strong password enforcement is a perfect example of why we need regex support for all fields. With regex support, you could obviously control password length and which characters must or can’t be present. Since there is going to be a big push on CRED/forms, regex support should be high on the list its features. They go together like peanut butter and jelly.

      • Hi Amir – We’ve started using CRED more and more, but for one-off forms it’s usually Gravity forms we go to. The main features which cred could benefit from in my opinion:

        – Multi-step (page) forms
        – Zapier Integration (this would be a HUGE benefit if Toolset could integrate as a whole with Zapier)

        Looking forward to seeing the progress!

        • Thanks. This helps a lot. I’m familiar with Zapier, but haven’t used it. I’ll shoot you an email to understand what you need for Zapier integration better. We’ve been dragging the need for multi-step forms for a long time. I very much hope that we manage to finally include it in the near future.

  2. Your yearly chart assumes no churn. It also assumes sort costs are the same every year.

    But lifetime accounts with based on two assumptions:

    1. Churn is inevitable.
    2. Sorry costs go down as the user becomes self reliant

    Based on these assumptions, a lifetime plan should work if it is $1 more than the revenue brought in by the average customer over there lifetime.

    The problem is a company has to be disciplined in accounting and spending over the long term to not take on more expenses than churn can handle. Unfortunately raising process don’t solve that problem. It may even accelerate it.

    • Thanks for your good suggestions. If there are also features for Toolset that you’re particularly looking for, we’d love to hear what.

    • @Hashim, I agree about churn. I’ve always thought that after about 3 years of subscription the company comes out ahead. However, I don’t know how long people, on average, continue to use Toolset. Because it is somewhat unique, it may be longer that it is for a theme.

      Also, I find I still need to use support even after owning Toolset for a few years. I started to feel guilty asking for help, or heated that they remind me how many support requests I’ve made when I’m giving beta feedback.

  3. I have a few suggestions to what could bring more value to the product.

    1. The visual parts of toolset sucks. I know Gutenberg integration is coming and elementor integration as well (from the elementor team), but until that truly happens this is still a huge pain for the product.

    2. User meta
    Wordpress sucks when it comes to user meta. Why are users forced to use Gravatar to create a profile image? All Saas apps or websites that allow you to create a profile will give you access to upload a profile image. But gravatar is for geeks and users are not geeks. Cred can be used to add and edit user meta. Please make it possible to add / edit the profile image as well from the Cred forms.
    So because CRED can handle user meta, please make it handle all user meta like the profile image, so you can actually build great user profile pages for your customers.

    3. Admin menu editor.
    When you create custom post types the admin area gets cluttered very fast. I know there are plugins out there that will make it possible to edit the admin menu, but when you have a product that is actually responsible for creating this clutter (like types) Then I think the option of having an admin menu editor in toolset would be nice, so when you build solutions for your customers, you can actually give them a better admin experience, without needing an extra third party plugin.

    4. Access needs an overhaul
    Access is very limited in what you can do to control access by the user.

    5. File manager
    When you create a CRED form that allows for file upload, it goes into the uploads folder. It would be nice if you could actually control where to put these uploaded files, so you are able to protect file locations with membership systems,

    These are just some of the shortcomings I have faced with toolset over the years.

    • Thanks for your feedback. Most of it is completely clear to me. Can you tell me what you’re missing in Access?

      • Access is limited to one “membership” per user. Because you cant add multiple user roles to users all though it is possible.

        Its a political decision by your team to limit the number of user roles to a single user role.

        The WP_User object has an array of roles, and you can add more than one role to a user.

        The documentation https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_User

        Shows that it is perfectly allowed to have multiple roles per user.

        Because of this I have never been able to use access because other plugins may control capabilities from roles and not real capabilities.

        I have discussed this in the support forum multiple times, but it is a political decision to limit the number of roles you can apply to one. And you cant fight politics.

        • Thanks for the pointer. This change is possible in Access, but requires major rewrite, so we can’t include it in the immediate future. I took a note to include such feature in a major rewrite of Access.

  4. One thing I would love to see in Toolet is the ability to create graphs and charts from queries.

    • I’m not sure that we can include this in Toolset, but we should definitely offer an API that allows you to connect external libraries to plot this information. Are you working with any libraries that can draw these graphs?

      • It depends a bit, in some cases I use Formidable Forms https://formidableforms.com/features/create-a-graph-wordpress-forms/

        However in many cases it would be just perfect if the Bar and Counter Modules in Divi could be used with dynamic values coming from a view, unfortunately those modules just allow static numeric values atm.

        About the libraries I think with support for chart.js and flot.js the most common chart scenarios could be accomplished.
        Maybe support for Echarts might be nice too, but I have never used it so far.

  5. Thanks Amir.

    I have used Toolset for a number of years and appreciate the dedication and support the team offer.

    If I had some suggestions for improvements it would be:

    1) Be able to resize the editing windows. If I have a lot of code I often paste into a text editor so I can see more/debug then paste it back into the Toolset editor(s) to see if it works!

    2) When using AJAX to update views based on filters, if the page is not cached it can take some time for the display to update. This is fine but it would be useful to have a spinning wheel or some indication to the user that something is happening.

    3) Be able to order the display of taxonomies in the admin panel (both in the menus but importantly when editing a post type). Post Types have an admin menu position but Taxonomies do not.

    4) Probably a bug-fix. Hitting ‘Save’ on Layouts doesn’t seem to save the layout. Only Saving and Closing seems to work (Chrome on Mac).

    Many Thanks

    Gavin

    • Thanks for your suggestions. Everything that you listed here looks doable and not huge projects. We’re closing a major development cycle now. Then, we’ll go over the feature requests here and see which ones we can add to the next release. I can’t promise yet, but we’ll do our very best.

  6. While I see how Lifetime accounts might be an unsustainable business model in this phase of your company and the long run. I think you ought to make a clear distinction AND give credit to us early adopters. Who saw the potential in Types and Views, bought a lifetime account and by doing so helped your company grow in it’s early days. Early adopters took a ‘risk’ investing in a new product (which was promising but tbh also fairly rough around the edges), not knowing if the product or company would exist a couple years down the road. My 2c.

    • I agree (and it is easy because I’ve been a lifetime account holder since 2014 and used Toolset since 2013) and I also think those that missed out on Lifetime account upgrades need to realize that it will take a few years of renewals before they accumulate the cost of a Lifetime Upgrade. (I just hit break even this year!) So EVENTUALLY they will pay more IF they are still using Toolset AND want support and updates AND haven’t moved on to something else OR abandoned WordPress altogether because of Guttenberg or some other “improvement” forced on us.

      I like Toolset, Amir, and what they offer. I would pay for new modules, too.

  7. Please don’t apologise. You made good business choices then, and you’re making good business choices now. I’m a “lifetime” because I paid in more than I thought I maybe should back then, and now I’ll benefit from that investment. We’re all getting to understand the more mature pricing models of businesses that want to be sustainable for their customers.

  8. Requests I’ve made that seem to have gone nowhere…

    THE ABILITY TO ADD CUSTOM UPLOAD DIRECTORIES FOR IMAGES/FILES

    If you’re building a directory of some sort with thousands of records and each record has several images, dumping all those images into the default WP directories is extremely messy.
    — Set default custom upload directories in Toolset settings for images and files, or default directories based on custom post type.
    — Allow the creation of custom upload directories on a per image/file-upload field basis.
    — Add an option to create custom upload directories based on user id so that all uploads by a particular user are saved in a dedicated directory.
    — Add an option to create custom upload directory for each new record/post where all of that post’s related uploads are saved.

    AUTOMATICALLY DELETE IMAGES/FILES

    When deleting a record/post, automatically delete its related images/files(and resized variants).
    — Option to set this at a per-CPT level. If the images/files for a particular post type are likely to be shared with other posts, turn automatic deletion off for that CPT. However, if images/files are not likely to be shared, such as in large directories etc, then turn automatic deletion on for that CPT.
    — Option to set this on a per-post basis also. For example, when creating a post that you know will be deleted after a short period of time, such as a promotion.
    — Of course it’d nice too if Toolset could scan the database to see if an image/file is used elsewhere and work that into the process as a backup.

    SANITIZE AND VALIDATE FIELDS USING CASCADING REGEXs

    The ability to add several cascading custom regular expressions to each and every field to first sanitize and then validate input.
    — First provide the option to add ONE OR MORE find-and-replace regexs(powered by preg_replace I believe). This would allow us to manipulate and sanitize user submitted data BEFORE validating it. For example, if I wanted to collect a simple phone number in the format of 1112223333, some users are likely to type (111) 222-3333 instead. Rather than having this produce a validation error and forcing the user to re-enter their data in a specific way, I’d rather help them(via sanitizing) by first finding all non-digit characters from their submission, replace those non-digit characters with nothing (“”) and THEN validate the now sanitized data.
    — Secondly, add a validation regex to confirm data is in the expected format before saving. If not, allow for a custom error message to be displayed to user.
    — Data saved should be the SANITIZED and validated version.
    — Regexs should apply to BOTH CRED forms AND back-end forms/posts if possible.

    PLEASE NOTE: I’m not asking for Toolset to come up with all the various scenarios and regexs for find-and-replace, just give us a find field where we can enter a regex, then a replace field where we can place a string of text or nothing (“”). It would be nice if you gave a few regex options from a drop list for basic things like selecting all numbers, letters, extra white-space etc and then a “Custom Regex” option, BUT THIS WOULD JUST BE A BONUS.

    Example of sanitize plus validation:
    SANITIZE:
    Find [enter find regex 1] and replace with [string 1] – Add Another
    Find [enter find regex 2] and replace with [string 2] – Add Another
    Find [enter find regex 3] and replace with [string 3] – Add Another
    VALIDATE:
    Validate [enter final validation regex]
    Validation Failed error: [string]

    ADD LOOP-ITERATION CONDITIONS TO CONDITIONAL OUTPUT

    [wpv-conditional if loop iteration = 1]
    [wpv-conditional if loop iteration > 1]
    [wpv-conditional if loop iteration = odd]
    [wpv-conditional if loop iteration = even]
    etc..

    The functionality of wpv-item should be merged into Conditional Output(wpv-conditional) to make it easier to show/hide data based on the loop iteration. Doing it this way also adds much more flexibility and more compact code than using wpv-item as is.

    Support discussion on this topic and various usage

    ————-

    Since we’re forced now to pay more for Toolset and to pay forever, I sure as heck hope your development speed picks up. Considering the post relationship/repeating field groups update is like 5-6 months behind schedule, I don’t have much hope that the items mentioned above will see the light of day any time soon. All we can do I guess is hope… and pay.

    • Sorry for being slow to respond. We weren’t ignoring your past requests, it’s just impossible to handle everything in parallel. In this very long development cycle we’re adding full support for post relationships. It’s not on your list, but that’s something that I’m sure will help you build great sites (coming in about 2 weeks).

      Everything on your list looks important. I think that we’ll start with more features for the View loop and conditional output. Seems to me that this is something that a lot of people will use once we have it.

      Thanks again for your great feedback.

    • THE ABILITY TO ADD CUSTOM UPLOAD DIRECTORIES FOR IMAGES/FILES
      AUTOMATICALLY DELETE IMAGES/FILES

      +1

  10. 1) Making it easier to do calculations, replace existing custom fields with these calculations, sort by calculations, etc.

    2) Improve CRED – I often need to use Gravity Forms because it has a feature I really need, would love it if CRED could do most of what GF does

    3) Consider merging with a Page Builder company like Beaver Builder to basically make an all-in-one site builder

    4) Make the overall process of creating a cpt, the custom fields for it, the View for it, the front end form for adding/editing it, more seamless

    • Sorry for the slow response. We were looking to see what comes up a lot before jumping in. CRED is high on our list too. We use GF also on our sites and it makes no sense that CRED would be missing basic features for simple forms. Can you tell me what features you’d need in CRED so you can use it exclusively for your forms?

      • Overall the ease of use of GF is just much easier to create forms and do things like add default text, setting required fields, conditional logic, placing fields in columns. A drag and drop interface like GF would also be great.

        And having some pre-made styles for forms would save me a lot of time to get something decent looking up fast.

  11. Dear Amir,

    Really excellent news and support,here a few things it may deserve your attention:

    1. Deep integration with elemonter 2.0 and Gutenberg.
    2. UX UI enhancement to make it more flexible and user friendly.
    3. Step by step getting-started videos as case study web site showing all Toolset features.
    4. Full workflow system capabilities with CRED forms.

    With Thanks,
    ArabsW

    • Sorry for the slow response. Can you tell me more about what you’re looking to see in CRED?

      • What I meant about (Full workflow system capabilities with CRED forms) is to add a way to route the form/request application for approval in various stages. It should be able to auto-route to designate personnel for approval and status of the application be updated as well. with file attachment auto notification to various parties to take action and notify requested when completed. with PDF to print and save.

  12. Elegant Themes has just released a new Divi developer API. Will this will help Toolset integrate with Divi better by chance?

    As a Divi user, I’m a little jealous of Elementor’s new ability to natively design templates for all posts, archives, post types etc using dynamic data. Apparently they’re also going to work more on integrating with Toolset(Can you share anything about that?). I hope Elegant Themes is paying attention… They seem to be playing catch-up when it comes to a lot of new features that appear on Elementor first.

  13. Amir, you used to have a theme membership upgrade, where we can pay the difference and create unlimited themes with toolset included, I can’t find it anywhere, it that also gone or now its available with every account?

    Secondly, are you planning to remove lifetime for WPML, is it the right time to buy lifetime?

  15. Some integration with google. I love to have a connection betweend your WP-posts and your calander to fetch and update events. Google docs would also be great to integrat at least as a user field

  16. Hi Amir, Here are a few suggestions:

    1) There has been good work on documentation and how to videos. However, go into search and you get results for everything, not just documentation. Please add some source filters. Perhaps an index of videos.

    2) Add percentage / range, repeating date, and calculated fields (math, combine text input) to Toolset.

    3) CRED support for #2 would go a long way to making it more than a data entry form. CRED Conditional logic.

    4) Add a Rules plugin (If This Then That) based on built in WordPress hooks and filters.

    5) A lot of people comment that the Toolset interface is confusing. Anything that can be done to make it clearer and more streamlined.

    I didn’t realize that a lot of people were unaware of the pricing change. I got the notice about the lifetime plan going away in an email as well as seeing it mentioned on the blog. It is a good habit for people to subscribe to the newsletters for their products. Perhaps encourage people to opt-in to receiving important account information emails (however that is phrased) so that all customers get notified of changes.

    Thanks!

    • Thanks a lot for your feedback David.

      The upcoming release of Toolset plugins includes many GUI improvements. We’ve quietly done two rounds of usability testing for Toolset in the last month. These tests are revealed a number of usability issues that we fixed. These improvements are focused on beginners, so I’m not sure you’ll notice them, but they are significant. We’ll continue with usability testing for more advanced subjects – one round of testing each month.

      We’re measuring the time it takes for people to accomplish something with Toolset. The time from “zero” to “basic usage” went down from over an hour to 45 minutes. I’m sure that we can further improve this and also bring down the time it takes to do more advanced things with Toolset.

      We indeed talked about the pricing and account change. Unfortunately, only 35% of the people open our newsletters and only 4% click. The “industry average” is significantly lower. This teaches me that a single announcement isn’t enough. Lesson learned.

      • It’s awesome to learn that you have been doing usability testing / fixes. Hopefully that will also cut down on support requests and renewal churn.

  17. Toolset in general is a great tool and the support is fantastic

    Some thoughts on improvements for CRED and ACCESS…

    CRED
    Add contact form and subscription form functionality to CRED so that there is the option to work a little more like a traditional contact form (i.e just send an email notification when a form is filled out). Currently you have to create a Custom Post type and each form entry creates a new post which isn’t ideal.

    Integration with Mailchimp, Hubspot etc

    Improved Workflow for CRED. The ability to create an approval process would be great – i.e a user creates a post which is saved as pending. This fires off an email to an approver who can hit approve or deny from within the email. This then moves the workflow along by publishing the post or sending back to the user or next person in the approval process

    Similar to above, the ability for a user registration workflow. Ie a user can sign up but is assigned a custom role like pending until the admin manually approves them

    Copying the value of a field (a bit like you do with E Commerce where the user checks shipping address is same as billing address)

    Multi-column list fields like – https://docs.gravityforms.com/list/

    Nice way to create Quizzes, Surveys, Polls

    Plot posts (events) by date on a calendar

    Pre-populate fields – i.e if a user is logged in you can choose for the email address field to be pe-populated for them on the front end

    Generate PDFS from cred forms like this – https://gravitypdf.com/

    ACCESS
    Being able to assign multiple roles to a user!

    Access control by taxonomy and by individual users

    Hiding options in the dashboard by user role like – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/adminimize/

  18. I’ve been ill for a longer time so missed any warning about the stop of lifetime accounts. Anyway, my account always said ‘lifetime’ and worked that way. However after returning to work recently, i found that I can’t upgrade the plugins anymore, and it’s already like 3 weeks i’m stuck and in endless chats with the support on this. This is absolutely not funny.

    • I see that you bought an Agency account (not a Lifetime account) on September 2016, so it actually expired on September 2017 and not in the last few months. Earlier, you received a complementary WPML account, which allows you to download Access plugin, this should still work.

      Can you tell me if you’re talking about something else?

  19. hi Amir, my account didn’t expire on September 2017, in that sense that everything kept working as it was, incl updates. Also, whenever i went into my account on wp-types, it said ‘lifetime’. I checked it multiple times. Just as my WPML is lifetime. Thanks!

    • hi Amir,
      i had another look in ‘my account’ after your reply. Now i understand the confusion, but i’m not happy with this situation. When i go into my account to check my status, and see there:
      Subscription
      WPML – complementary No expiry
      well, that should mean just that: no expiry. Why would there be written no expiry when somebody goes check his expiry date, it doesn’t make sense and that’s how i didn’t get to renew. And i didn’t get a mail with teh offer to renew or update either.
      I hope I didnt lose my lifetime account opportunity because of some unclear UI wording??

      • Our system does send automatic reminder emails about upcoming renewals. It sends them 30 days and 3 days before accounts expire. We closed lifetime accounts and upgrades to lifetime accounts not because of a GUI problem, but because of the reasons that I tried to explain in this blog post. I understand that this makes Toolset a bad deal for some people and we understand if they don’t want to continue using Toolset. I tried to explain that we had to choose between dropping the entire project and dropping lifetime accounts.

        • “We closed lifetime accounts and upgrades to lifetime accounts not because of a GUI problem” -> that’s totally not what i wrote.
          “Our system does send automatic reminder emails about upcoming renewals” -> sure i believe so, but interestingly ididnt get either of those, while i got all the other mails (news and such) each time 🙁

          • Ok so we’re not very interested, nevermind. I won’t renew just because I feel like i’m being cheated on and dragged through the dirt on top of that. If you’d tread all the same way there wouldn’t be a problem, but you can’t let some keep their lifetime while others were robbed of that black-on-white promise. Who would still believe you to not increase next year to 250$ yearly? It’s not even a matter of money but a matter of behaviour. When i promise something, i keep it. Giving your early birds the chance to upgrade was the least you could do. New users are a whole different thing. So now i’m screwed that i can’t finish off some projects I was working on a long time, not to speak of countless hours of studying toolset that will go to waste. And i don’t fall for those -again beautiful- promises of ‘oh we have this great new version coming up with all the things you need’ while the forum is full of typical ‘it’s on our list and will come soon’ replies, many a lot of years old and being repeated until today. Somebody will have to explain those customers that their sites are being misused due to old unupdated toolset plugins, in the close future – and it won’t be me.

  20. I see ET is finally starting to make Divi dynamic. Are you working with them to make sure Toolset is fully supported?

    When selecting a dynamic option to fill a Divi field, as shown on their Sneak Peak blog post, it would be nice if we could select available Views there also.

    • We also saw the announcement about Divi’s new API. We’re going to try and create deeper integration with Toolset using this API in the next couple of weeks. Of course, I’ll write about this in a separate blog post when we have some news.

  21. I appreciate all the hard work and support that has gone into Toolset. I’m glad you are updating to a more sustainable pricing model that will allow for the continued improvement of Toolset. You guys are the first business to learn this the hard way in recent years. The internet is a wild frontier that we are all learning about together. I hope others can see this and support the necessary changes. Also, your pricing update is completely reasonable.

  22. Shalom Amir,

    A question if I may:

    We have Toolset Types plugin version 2.2.23 installed.

    It now indicates an available update to version 3.0.

    However, when we try to update, it says we need to register – actually, purchase a license.

    However, when you go to Dashboard>>Toolset Types, there is a remark at the top of the screen saying that: “This free version of Types will continue to receive bug fixes, security updates and compatibility updates through 2018”.

    Can you please explain? How can it recieve free version updates through 2018 if it now requires a purchase for updating to the newer version?

    Thanks,

    Noam

    • Right now, there’s no planned change for Types on WPORG. We’ll release updates there in case there’s a critical bug or security fix. You’ll need to install the first update from WPORG manually and then updates will arrive normally via WPORG (but there’s nothing to install yet).

  23. Re: #comment-344308

    Shalom Amir,

    Thank you very much for your prompt reply.

    However, it is not clear to us:
    1. We\’ll release updates there:

    1.1 Where is exactly there? Not sure what you mean.
    1.2 How will we be alerted of new versions? If it not through the usual udapes in dashboard?

    2. You\’ll need to install the first update from WPORG manually :

    1.1 How do we do that and where?

    3. What about version 3.0? Will it keeps indicating in the updates section in the dashboard although it is actually not available for the free version?

    It all looks like a bit of a mess now.

    Thanks,

    Noam

    • When we have updates for Types for WordPress.org, we’ll update the plugin here:
      https://toolset.com/home/types-manage-post-types-taxonomy-and-custom-fields/

      I know that it’s a bit of a problem. On one hand, our code will mask this update (very much not intentional) because it will see that a higher version already exists. On the other hand, we don’t have the details of people using Types from WPORG, so we cannot reach out.

      My suggestion is to check the plugin page next week. There should already be a minor update for Types there. This minor update will fix the upgrade problem, so that next versions come from WPORG without redirecting to toolset.com.

      2. To install a plugin manually, you need to download the ZIP file (from https://toolset.com/home/types-manage-post-types-taxonomy-and-custom-fields/) and upload it to your WordPress site.

      Like we previously wrote, Version 3.0 and above will only be available from toolset.com and no longer for free from WPORG.

      I hope this clarifies. It’s a bit of a mess, but this minor update to Types on WPORG will untangle it completely.

    • There’s still a glitch coming from Installer in WPML. WPML is pushing Types to look for updates in the wrong place. This will finally be resolved when we update WPML. Anyway, we’re going to include new versions of Types for WPML clients, so there will not be an issue.