That’s what it sounds like via Joost de Valk’s post this morning as he announced that he’s looking for more help as it pertains to the community forums that sometimes can get overrun (I wonder if this article by ManageWP had anything to do with this recent announcement: Is WordPress SEO by Yoast Broken?):
Starting in August, we’ll start offering a premium version of the plugin, including support (as in, you’ll get a direct email address and we’ll reply to your questions as soon as we can), at a yearly fee, starting from $89 for a single site to $349 for unlimited sites. That’s $29 a month for support on unlimited sites and just $7.50 for a single site. And of course we won’t remove the download from WordPress.org and we won’t disable the free forums, so you don’t have to pay us anything if you don’t want to.
The plugin will have some other functionality that’s not included in the SEO plugin (what? that’s still a secret 😉 ) and we’ll use those users as a “testbed”, if they want to, for new features.
New features that aren’t in the existing free plugin? Yes, that makes perfect sense.
For me this isn’t a surprise – if anything it’s a surprise that it took this long for him to capitalize on the obvious product and marketplace dominance that he’s grown over the past few years – there are few other SEO-related plugins that get as much attention as his.
Coming in August – so stay tuned.
Oh, and by the way, since drafting this article (which originally started out focusing on ManageWP’s article) it seems that Joost has responded to Tom’s blog post:
just hired another full time developer and you’ve seen that we have quite good premium support in place for our premium plugin offerings, we’re planning on using that infrastructure for a premium version of WordPress SEO, which should allow both the free and premium version of that plugin to become even better.
While I’m sad to read this post, it also shows me that we have to do even better. And we will.
I’m sure it will get better, for sure. Rock on guys, keep it coming!
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