I feel that several years ago, a lot more plugins were a bit more lenient in the sense that even if you stopped paying for the plugins when your annual license expired, the only thing you would not be able to do was that you no longer had access to any new updates or fixes or new functionality.
However, in the last 18 months or so, I have noticed that a lot of plugins now will stop working, or certain functionality will be become disabled or they cripple them to the point that there is no point in using the plugin anymore.
Anyways. It is just my observation from a limited amount of Plugins I interact with under my plugin universe.
I am very curious to see what others are experiencing as their license expires and they don't renew by the date of expiration.
Not complaining but sometimes life gets in the way and I can't always be on top of over 25 plugins across a dozen or so websites
always recommended to read the fine print before buying plugins and themes. i have let a few premium subscriptions expire and they all continued to work “fine” (minus the updates, potential security issues, and support, of course). for one of the plugins i was even able to download newer versions by clicking the link in the original invoice mail.
Maybe. But the question is whether it is smart to keep such plugins on your site, even if they do work. One of the main sources of malware infections is plugins that have not been updated by the site admin.
Yeah, it is a pain to have many plugin subscriptions. Especially as new, better plugins come out but you are stuck with so many plugins on legacy sites.
That is why I really prefer LTDs. Right now my only plugin subscription is FacetWP, but I could replace it with Gridbuilder, if necessary.
Now I sometimes invest in LTDs even if I don’t need the plugin yet.
I know it falls on me at the end of the day, but in the heat of the moment, I never do the due diligence that I should be doing in the first place.
I’ll disable/remove/won’t buy those.
Here’s the issue. Some of my clients purchase a website but don’t care to have me maintain them after. When their license expires and they stop updating the site, that’s on them… but my work, which I’ve completed, and paid the vendors I use (in this case, a plugin developer) should continue to function.
Don’t want to updates? Fine. Don’t want support from the plugin dev? Fine. But your plugin should not act as a time bomb or hold functionality hostage.
**What I am okay with**… plugins where certain functionality stops working on the back end but continues to work in the way it was delivered. Plugins like motion.page and now ACF Pro will have limited functionality on the back but the front of the site is unaffected. This is okay, IMO.
In a perfect world, we’d all charge good money for sites and be selling full-featured hosting and management plans that includes license management. And we’d all pay plugin developers for access to updates.
But that’s not the world we live in. Clients are often cheap or lazy.
That said, I use very few paid plugins nowadays. I think I’m down to ACF Pro, Gravity Forms, MotionPage, and FacetWP now. I will continue to use them until breaking-features starts extending to the frontend.
Absolutely. I’ve found that happen with a few in recent months.
And many of them, Jetpack is a prime example, are moving functionality out of their free versions.