Often users would like to get a free trial of Relevanssi Premium, but we always say no. Why is that?
The answer is simple. We offer our customers lots of liberties. Providing a temporary trial use is difficult.
Relevanssi customers have liberties
We don’t believe in spying on our customers or restricting their plugin use. All Relevanssi Premium licenses are unlimited. You can use the license on as many sites as you wish, without any activations or other restrictions. This is simple for us and provides the customers with valuable freedom.
This also means we can’t turn off the plugin from a customer’s site. We could do that if the plugin required an activation code.
Relevanssi Premium does use license keys. The keys only control access to upgrades and features that use our resources. Currently, that means the attachment content reading. This happens on our server and uses our resources, so it’s something we want to restrict to paying customers.
Refunds and a free version are available
What if you want to test Relevanssi? The free version from the WordPress.org plugin repository is often enough. If the free version works, the Premium will work too, and vice versa – the code base is almost the same for both plugins.
You may find out that the free version is good enough for you. It’s quite powerful in itself and can fulfil most needs for a better search.
If you need to try out the Premium features, the only way to do that is to buy a license. If it doesn’t work for you, you can get a refund within 30 days without problems or too many questions (though we would really prefer that if you have problems getting Relevanssi to work, you’d at least give us a chance to fix them – you’re paying for the support, please use it!).
While we do not offer free trials, we do respect and trust our customers to offer very flexible refunds.
How Relevanssi licenses work
Relevanssi Premium is available with an Annual subscription or a Permanent license.
New Annual subscriptions renew automatically each year. Each successful annual payment provides another year of updates, priority support and access to Premium services. You can cancel future renewals from your account. Cancellation does not remove access for the period you have already paid for.
Existing customers with a manually renewed Annual license are not automatically moved to a subscription. They can renew manually from their license expiry date or switch to automatic renewal with a recurring 20% existing-customer discount. Any remaining paid time is preserved.
If paid access ends, you can continue using the installed plugin, but updates, priority support and services such as attachment content reading are no longer available.
Permanent is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates and priority support, including future major versions.
Why does Relevanssi Premium cost as much as it does?
Selling Relevanssi Premium is our business and main source of income: it keeps us afloat. That’s simple and something most people will agree with.
There are people who question selling software licenses or complain about the prices. You may have noticed there are sites that sell WordPress plugins and theme licenses. They offer access to many premium plugins and themes for a low price. That’s legal, thanks to the GPL licensing used in these plugins and themes. Is it safe to use these sites? I would check all code downloaded from these sites for malware and trojans. If you’re not capable of doing that, think twice about whether you can trust the source or not.
Sometimes these sites justify their business by claiming WordPress plugins are too expensive. I can see that. Relevanssi pricing isn’t very flexible. I understand that what is cheap for someone may be too expensive for someone else. Relevanssi Premium pricing is ultimately driven by the cost of living in Finland – and that’s not cheap.
There’s some pressure against permanent licenses. Some people like permanent licenses, and I understand that. Getting your boss to accept a single payment is easier than accepting a yearly fee. For a business, the price difference often isn’t significant.
Yet, it’s the customer support that’s the biggest demand on our resources. The amount of development work is the same, no matter how many customers. We can work on code whenever there’s time for it – there’s rarely any pressure. Providing customer service is more demanding, and needs to happen now.
Right now, our resources are enough to cover the needs of our customers. What happens if we get a lot more customers? We need to either stop selling licenses or add expensive customer service resources. Neither of these options is particularly appealing.
