Haktan,
The problem is that it is disingenuous to offer a free product with the expectation that a prospective customer can test properly before making a buying decision. It is a sunk cost customer retention model that shifts the primary costs of deployment from the cost of your plug in to the costs involved in configuration and deployment.
I’m not unaware that others do this. However, it’s annoying to have to pay up front to do testing, and then request money back in hopes that someone will actually refund the money.
I have 39 years in the technology business and an MBA; I’m not just venting about an inconvenience. I’m pointing out a very real problem that not only your approach causes, but the problem that others that follow this same model create for prospective customers.
The WordPress plug-in industry is full of products that claim to do things, but they are full of bugs and problematic UI/UX issues. This is a fact. It appears that developers of plug-ins expect their customers to participate in bug identification and UI/UX problems instead of dealing with those issues before they go to market. It is a source of huge cost impact on the customers.
I charge $200 an hour for my time. How much do you think the fully-burdened cost of your plug in is for your customer who bought it if I’ve had to spend 2-3 hours trying to help your customer’s team resolve issues with it?
What ends up happening with your pricing/freemium model is that a customer purchases, sinks time and effort into it, and then feels compelled because of the sunk costs to spend more time sorting out problems. Instead, they could have tried the fully functional product, saw that it wasn’t a fit, and moved on to find something that did fit.
Instead of putting the burden on the customer, developers need to accept the burden of making a high quality competitive product that attracts customers instead of relying on a questionable freemium model that triggers sunk cost customer retention behaviour.
Changing your approach would probably increase your business and make your prospective customers happier, and you would own the responsibility of quality control, instead of forcing customers to share the responsibility of your QA.
