I am not taking stand for this plugin, not in any way, just some comments.
Building software takes time, which costs money.
Testing software takes time, which costs money.
Maintaining software takes time, which costs money.
Providing support takes time, which costs money.
Coming up with creative ideas for new software takes time, which costs money.
Selling extensions usually comes with free updates and support, so it costs money.
Mailwizz' target group is "every" digital marketer which is potentially hundreds of thousands of people, the potential is huge.
The target group for extensions, MBuilder or others, is never bigger then the number of licenses of Mailwizz that has been sold which currently are 4813 licenses.
So please compare the target groups. Mailwizz can potentially be sold in hundreds of thousands of units, while this or other plugins will never sell any more than maximum the sold number of units of Mailwizz (currently 4813 up til today) and most of those 4813 are not interested.
The cost for the development for any plugin is the same no matter of whether the target group is tens of thousands or 4813 and for any developer to build software, they need to sell licenses to pay for the maintenance and support.
Whining like this is partially the reason why we will never sell our plugins. I am actually even fearing releasing the few smaller plugins that I intended to release for free when we launch our hosted service, simply because of this. We have built an extensive Marketing Automation & ESP solution on top of Mailwizz with loads of plugins, integrations, new features, drag & drop editor, A/B testing, two dimensional pricing plans etc. We have a complete sales funnel for resellers selling subscriptions for this SaaS solution and apparently what we do has even got a couple of payment gateways to realize that they need to adapt their payment solutions to fit our use case. There is plenty of creative thinking in our solution.
If we were thinking of releasing our software as installable products (which we are not since we are a SaaS company), I would also charge for our ideas, besides the software as such. No one would ever buy what we have, simply because it's so massively extensive and there has been put so much efforts into it both in terms of requirements as well as development, test etc. It would simply be way too expensive.
When looking at people's profiles I realize that I own the highest number extended licenses (currently six + one regular that we use for development), I think that what the problem really is, is that Mailwizz is way too cheap for all that
@twisted1919 has put into it in terms of ideas, development, support and maintenance, but the pricing is probably set in relation to the size of the target group. Yet it seems that some people here do not pay the proper license fee for their way of using it.
People not working with development need to consider the
actual costs for providing extensions + the
theoretical maximum number of licenses that can be sold. No matter what, the money needs to come in and everyone has a possibility to choose whether to buy or not. Even I was considering to buy MBuilder just to get rid of our development costs for our own drag & drop editor extension, but since we need some 200 licenses in the long run, it was too costly. (besides our own plugin looks and works awesome, but that's another story
)
