There a hundreds and even thousands plugins for WordPress available for free, and that’s one of the truly great things about WordPress. But, only a fraction of that number is actually supported by the authors. And there is a good reason why is that.
If you use some small plugin, it’s usually no problem, and the support is not that important. You can usually find some help or even fix the problem yourself. But for more complex plugins, that’s not something you can do easily. And if you try to get support from author things can get complicated. Author may not have free time to help you, or he doesn’t check forums regularly and your question gets lost. And as far as I know no plugin authors offer support by email, so the time until you get actual help can be very long. And it’s understandable why the help is hard to get in most cases. Author made plugin and gave it for free, he can’t actually invest his time to help everyone who uses plugin, because believe me, support takes a lot of time, and all plugin authors are developers that need a way to earn money, and investing all time in free support will not make money. Donations are things of the past, and very few plugin authors get donations anyway, and they are usually very small.
Few months ago I needed help with Headspace2 plugin, and I posted on the official plugin issue tracker, forum, WordPress.org forum, and after week or so nothing happens. Plugin author didn’t responded to any of that. And it’s ok, I sat down and changed Headspace2 and fixed the problem, and added few useful things. Also, posted all changes to plugin issue tracker, and still, some 4 months after, no one responded, and these changes are still there. It’s fine, I use modified plugin and works fine, but plugin author didn’t provided any help or support. And it’s ok, he is not in any obligation to do so. Plugin is free, that’s enough.
But, than again, I am developer, and it’s not very hard for me to change some other plugin. But most WordPress users are not developers, and they need help with such tasks. And when plugin author can’t help them, they need to pay someone to do it, and that usually turns to be very, very expensive. And that’s why I decided to offer premium support for GD Star Rating, and why I offer premium plugins that are supported by me, and why I can guarantee that premium support will deliver results. Because you are paying me for it. And that is only a fraction of the cost you would need to pay some developer to help you, and question is if you will get what you need at all.
GD Star Rating is used on tens of thousands of blogs and if only few hundred of those need help from me, for free, I would need 48 hour day to help everyone. It would be nice if I can help everyone, but, I need to make a living and giving free support is not going to do that.
GD Star Rating is very, very powerful plugin, and in the same time that power comes from the complexity of the plugin. You can’t expect all the features plugin offers to be easy to use, because they have many different settings and options that offer almost complete freedom in turning GD Star Rating into what you need it to be. So, is the premium support subscription worth all that? Well, you be the judge of that. Please leave your comments and suggestion on further improvement of the service.
…on Dev4Press: http://www.dev4press.com/plugins/gd-star-rating/
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