Drew Strojny

Hey @vikasbobi,

This is Drew, the owner of The Theme Foundry (the company behind HappyForms). I sincerely apologize. You’re 100% right. We should have communicated this better and given you more time before releasing the upgrade. It’s not right for your client sites to break without more notice and communication.

If you still want to use HappyForms, we’d be happy to give you a special discount on the developer version so you can continue to use all the features with your clients.

Hey @paskadox,

It’s Drew again. I just replied to your other review 🙂

The reality is we tried this, but it didn’t work. We added several paid features over a 6 – 9 month period. For whatever reason, the free features were good enough for nearly everyone, and less than 50 out of 20,000+ active users upgraded. Maintaining HappyForms (not improving it) by providing bug fixes, support, and updates for WordPress compatibility costs somewhere around $15,000 – $20,000 per year in development time. There is simply no way we could continue providing that support while staying in business with 50 paying customers.

Like I said, we screwed up and I’m sorry. I understand and appreciate your frustration and I wish we had handled this better.

Hey @norbertma,

This is Drew, owner of The Theme Foundry (the company behind HappyForms). I’m really sorry we let you down here. We did not intend to mislead you. We made the mistake of misjudging what features users were willing to pay for. It was our fault. The reality is we needed more paying customers to support the continued development of HappyForms.

Hey @ocraminng,

This is Drew, owner of The Theme Foundry, the company behind HappyForms. I apologize that we had to remove features from the free version. The reality is we needed to make this change to continue supporting HappyForms. Still, we should have done a better job communicating with the change, and I apologize for that.

Hey @gerijsma,

This is Drew, the owner of The Theme Foundry (the company behind HappyForms). We understand the price considerations. Did you know we have a big discount available to existing users? If not, let us know, and we can give you more information. This reduces the cost to probably less than dining out for a single meal (dinner and drinks) once per year. We’re hopeful the value and convenience you get from HappyForms is at least worth that much.

@leehodson Thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate it. It means a ton that you would take the time to write such a considered and thoughtful reply. I know you’re done with HappyForms and want nothing to do with us, but I appreciate everything you’ve done for us in the past and I apologize we didn’t meet expectations.

I share your frustration. HappyForms had over 20,000 active users before we made any of these changes, but less than 50 users paid to upgrade and support ongoing development of HappyForms. 20,000 users were getting ongoing value from HappyForms, but less than .25% of them were willing to pay for it. I’m skeptical that with a lower price or a slightly different monetization strategy the floodgates would have opened and we’d have 1,000 – 2,000 paying customers.

The reality is a plugin like this cost real money to support and develop. While we probably could have done a better job around monetization strategy, we couldn’t continue to support it without paying customers. With that in mind, I’d love to hear any ideas you have around pricing and / or marketing a plugin like HappyForms.

Hey @bauhaus-design,

This is Drew, owner of The Theme Foundry. I promise you we had no master plan to collect positivities reviews first and demand high prices. We assumed more people would upgrade HappyForms, but we were clearly wrong. We had less than 50 paying users on a plugin that would cost $15,000 in annual development support and maintenance. That development cost doesn’t include any new features, just maintenance, answering support questions, and keeping up to date with WordPress. Our choice was to shut it down or get more customers to pay for it by moving more features to paid only. With that being said, I understand if you don’t believe me and are done with HappyForms and The Theme Foundry. I’m sorry we let you down.