Hey @kaylee,
Thanks for your feedback. We appreciate all feedback, whether positive or negative, as it helps us to improve the plugin 🙂 I just wanted to respond quickly to a couple of your points if that’s OK.
1) This free plugin is intended to display text from your posts and not photos or videos. We try to be up front about this and mention it in the description:
To display photos, videos, the number of likes, shares and comments for each Facebook post, multiple layout options, post filtering by type or #hashtag/string and more then upgrade to the Pro version. Try out the Pro demo.
I apologize if this wasn’t more obvious. We definitely don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
2) The reason we have to price the Pro version at $49 is due to the large amount of time and cost involved in both supporting and maintaining a plugin built on the Facebook API. As the plugin relies on Facebook’s API, and their API is constantly changing – removing things, adding things, and causing bugs – then it means that we need to be constantly updating the plugin and providing support to users who are affected by these changes. Not only paying customers, but also users of this free plugin free of charge. With almost 200,000 free users I’m sure you can imagine this takes up a lot of time and we get probably 20-30 new support tickets every day, many of which can take hours to resolve as we work through various Facebook issues with users. Part of me wishes we’d just built a contact form or slider plugin as plugins like that typically only require very occasional updates and so they can be sold for a much lower price. As you can see from our plugin change log we update the plugin very regularly (17 times so far this year).
I know from experience dealing with customers that have switched to our plugin from other Facebook plugins, that the level and speed of support and the frequency of updates of many other Facebook plugins is pretty poor. We pride ourselves on not only having the most feature-full, versatile, and robust Facebook plugin, but also providing quick, effective support – to both our free and Pro users – along with keeping the plugin up to date. This unfortunately means our costs are higher than many other plugins, but it results in a much better experience for our users.
I definitely understand that if you’re intending to use the plugin as only a minor part of your site then the cost may not be justifiable. But many people actually use the Pro plugin as a feature of their site, as you’re able to use it to create news feeds, photo and video galleries, event feeds, albums, reviews, carousels, and more.
Thanks again for your feedback Kaylee, we really do appreciate it. Hopefully my response is able to shed a little light on why the Pro version exists and why it’s priced accordingly. If you have any other feedback or questions at all then just let me know, and I hope you’re having a great weekend!
John
