Hello everyone,
The Festinger Vault is raising prices for the first time in the last 4 years. Beginning May 1, 2023, new sign-ups will be charged based on the pricing tables below. Any paying customer who signs up before May 1, 2023, including any currently paying customers who signed up at any point over the last 4 years, will stay at the old price. Please note that lifetime users will keep their lifetime access to all current downloads and existing features.
After not raising prices in our history, this was something we thought carefully about before deciding to do. While we have over a decade of network expansion and innovation under our belts, what may not be intuitive is that our goal is not to increase revenue from this change. We need to invest upfront in building out our network, and the main reason we’re making this change is to more closely map our business with the timing of our underlying costs. Doing so will enable us to further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation — which all of our customers will benefit from. Since this is a big change for us, I wanted to take the time to walk through how we came to this decision.
Festinger Vault’s History
It all started 12 years back… When I was sitting inside my cubicle, my first job was as a WordPress developer at a fancy agency. Coding was my life, it was there on my computer, my wallpapers, and even on my coffee cup. I probably mumbled some of it while I was sleeping too… But with the huge number of clients I handled, there came hundreds of HQ themes and plugin licenses to which I had full developer access legally. All of those were just lying in some random folder on my laptop.
Would I let all those licenses go to waste? Nah, that wasn’t happening. So, I thought of sharing them with my loved ones. Not my wife, duh! She doesn’t even know what WordPress is. I shared them with all of you guys. And they were absolutely free, 0$, Nada… No costs are involved. When I woke up the next day, I was surprised at how many people were grateful for the shares and the total amount of money all of us had saved in total went over $10k.
My how you’ve grown
Now, 4 years later, we have reached a new milestone of 50K+ members and 25K+ WordPress premium themes and plugins. Our strategy has always been to roll features out, limit them at first to higher tiers of paying customers, but, over time, roll them down through our plans and eventually to even our lowest plan customers. We believe everyone should be fast, reliable, and secure online regardless of their budget. And we believe our continued success should be primarily driven by new innovation, not by milking old features for revenue.
And we’ve delivered on that promise, accelerating our roll-out of new features across our platform and bundling them into our existing plans without increasing prices. What you get for our recurring and lifetime plans today is orders of magnitude more valuable across every dimension — performance, reliability, and security — than those plans were when they launched.
And yet we know we are our customers’ infrastructure. You rely on us. And therefore we have been very reluctant to ever raise prices just to take price and capture more revenue.
What next?
Early on, we only charged a lower price monthly because we were an unproven service we knew customers were taking a risk on. Today, that’s no longer the case. The majority of our customers have been using us for years and, from our conversations with them, plan to continue using us for the foreseeable future. In fact, one of the top requests we receive is from customers who want to pay once in a lifetime rather than getting billed every month.
While I’m proud of our pace of innovation, one of the challenges we have is managing the cash flow to fund those investments as quickly as we’d like. We invest upfront in building out our network or developing a new feature, but then only get paid monthly by our customers. That, inherently, is a governor of our pace of innovation. We can invest even faster — hire more engineers, deploy more servers — if those customers who know they’re going to use us for a lifetime pay for us up front. We have no shortage of things we know customers want us to build, so by collecting revenue earlier we know we can unlock even faster innovation.
In other words, we are making this change hoping most of you won’t pay us anything more than you did before. Instead, our hope is that most of you will adopt our new pricing plans — you’ll get to lock in the existing pricing, and you’ll help us further accelerate our network growth and pace of innovation.
Finally, I wanted to mention that something isn’t changing: the existing lifetime plans. You will still have access to unlimited downloads for a lifetime. It will still have all the features it has today. And we’re still committed to, over time, rolling many more features that are only available in lifetime plans today down to the monthly plans over time. Our mission is to help build a better WordPress environment. We want to win by being the most innovative company in the world. And that means making our services available to as many people as possible, even those who can’t afford to pay us right now.
The Lifetime Pro license will have a small update fee for those who are currently on a lifetime plan. The exact upgrade fee will be announced within 2 weeks. But, for those of you who can pay: thank you. You’ve funded our innovation to date. And I hope you’ll opt to switch to our annual billing, so we can further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation.
Last note: Make sure to sign up here for the current lifetime plan. This will be your last chance to get it only for $199.
Thanks, everyone.
The Festinger Vault team
