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We hired a developer to improve our site after having it with Wix. He recommended WordPress. We weren’t familiar with WordPress and went along with him and paid lots. Now that it’s completed he’s charging for every email we send him. We want to let him go.
He always said it was our site, and we can do whatever we want with it. Now at the end of the day we can’t do anything without his say so and we’re stuck.
Friends, any thoughts on what we can do??
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I would personally move the site to other hosting. Make sure you own the domain. Get someone more reasonable to handle any changes you want made.
Without more context it’s hard for me to judge how unreasonable the developer is being. If you need additional development done, obviously those hours would require payment.
But just charging for emailing with a question seems a bit extreme. Again, I don’t have the whole picture.
If he mentioned that you guys have full ownership of the code, I would request a handover and a quote for support with the migration.
Also; by going with WordPress the whole benefit should be that you guys are able to update the site without a developer. That is the point of a CMS. So it’s strange that he is gatekeeping there. It should be in his interest to get clients informed on how to do edits.
Do you have the hosting and domain information and login? If so, you can do whatever you want without him.
Get a new developer. I’ve been doing this for 23 years and never did anything like that. If anything my goal is to educate the customer so they can update the site themselves.
No point filling up my schedule with stuff like changing a picture or a sentence…
Are you asking him to do it for you? Or are you trying to do it yourself? If you are trying to do it yourself then he shouldn’t be charging you anything. You paid him for the work, it’s your site, so you should be able to work on it and do whatever you want.
I had a client with a similar story, they hired a developer who charged them $2k for a simple website. They finished the site, but then wanted $300 a month for mantenience (something that he said would be included with the $2k tag). The client paid the 2k, but the $300 was too much. They let him go, but he then took the site hostage. Thankfully the client had access to the hosting, and we kicked that person out.