Worst Customer Service on the face of the planet!

  • cdcidevel

    (@cdcidevel)


    8 years, 4 months ago

    When you email support for this company one of the first things you should do is go obtain a brick and hit yourself over the head with it since that will be a more pleasant experience than talking to someone from this company.

    Especially Christie Chirinos.

    First, it does not matter what you email them, they will ignore it and send you a canned response that has absolutely NOTHING to do with what you sent to them or asked.

    You have to respond pointing out how worthless their first answer was in order to get someone to actually read your initial email and respond to you.

    In the 6 weeks I was reviewing this plugin I witness 3 price increases.

    They used to allow you to purchase any 3 add-ons of your choice for a set price, however that is now gone.

    They initially went to a 3 tier pricing setup where the bundled plugins in each tier. The first tier is presented like it includes 8 plugins, but in reality 5 of them are free and can be installed by anyone through their WordPress site.

    The other 3 are completely useless.

    So you need to look at the middle tier before this form is really capable of doing anything remotely of value. Then you quickly discover because of how they force you to purchase their add-ons you actually need the Tier 3 package at $600 per year!!!! Yes $600 per year! The most expensive plugin bar-none.

    If you’re lucky you could make a more complex commercial site work with the middle tier, but probably not. They have grouped their add-ons to force you to purchase tier 3.

    THEN since no one was purchasing their email service, then now force you to buy it as part of the 3 tiers, so the price has been raised again.

    Nobody needs this email service, Caldera Labs simply needs to fix the plugin so it actually sends email.

    Would I pay this company any money?

    With WP Forms being $199 a year, Gravity Forms being $199 a year, and in the lead for me so far as the most usable product NinjaForms being $499 a year, with companies that all read their email and actually answer what you’re asking, why would I ever pay $600 a year to Caldera Labs?

    Well here is one answer, it looks like Caldera Forms can create “routes” or “destinations” for forms. Meaning it looks like it may be possible to take a form convert the fields to an XML file and attach it to an email. This would be the ONLY reason I would even speak with this company again.

    Honestly, if you want something free try NinjaForms. They know how to support their users and read and respond to emails.

    This company? $600 a year? For what? For you to waste all my valuable time?

    They actually treated me like it was an honor to even have one of them respond to me.

    Complete and utter waste of time.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Josh Pollock

    (@shelob9)

    8 years, 4 months ago

    I’m sorry that our company didn’t fit your needs and that you’re upset.

    That said, we’re a small company (mainly just me and Christie) and we charge for support, beacuse it allows us to prioritize our paying customers, those who make it possible for us to keep building this free plugin and contributing to the community.

    I can’t apologise for prioritizing those who support our work. We have support options starting at $16 a month.

    Yes, our prices have changed. Our add-ons went from $50 for an add-on to $75. We also added additional value to our bundles. Same packages but you also get the option to use Caldera Forms Pro. I can’t appologize for making our pricing structure sustainable for our company. I hope our users understand we have to make money or there is no plugin.

    If our approach doesn’t fit your needs, I’m sorry. But, this is our business model, it was created with intent and will probably evolve more as we go and continue to figure out what works best for us and our users.

    fiercegeek

    (@fiercegeek)

    8 years, 3 months ago

    I’m on the opposite side of the fence. I’ve tried WP Forms, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and Contact Form 7, and like Caldera the best.

    We’re using Caldera on multiple sites and haven’t needed to purchase any add-ons. The free version of Caldera is the only one we could find that met our needs with conditional form fields and excellent documentation that made it easy for us to interact with it in javascript. Not to mention not needing to rely on email for form submissions, because the submissions are stored in a database available in the UI.

    Thread Starter cdcidevel

    (@cdcidevel)

    8 years, 3 months ago

    @josh:

    Charging for support is expected, even charging for add-ons. No one can expect your company to simply work for no income.

    However setting your prices to force users to purchase your most expensive offering, which you keep raising the price on is unacceptable.

    Your bundles are misleading and simply force people to purchase tons of things they do not need nor do they want.

    This is an approach of a company that can’t see anything or has a support team that no one wants.

    Raising your prices overnight from $50 to $75 PER add-on shows your company is in serious trouble. No successful product has a 50% price increase overnight.

    It is obvious you could not see your email service, so you ram it into your add-on bundles and force people to buy it, blaming WordPress and site hosting for emails coming out of your plugin from being blocked.

    A yearly fee of $600 to simply use a form plugin? Seriously?

    So now you’re saying on top of that someone has to even pay $16 a month for a better support level?

    Does the $16 a month mean you actually read emails instead of selecting random unrelated canned responses to email people?

    I know many companies that became extremely successful on support alone. However, they gave support above and beyond. Not some random unrelated canned email.

    What you have done is taken a large number of plugins that did or did not sell by themselves and force it into an extremely expensive offering because they could not hold their own in the market place.

    All of this is too bad really since your work showed a lot of promise.

    So where does this end? You have to now pay $600 a year, yes billed yearly ahead of time, if you’re monthly it is more, and on top of that what now $16 a month for support? Puts your plugin what around $800 a year to use?

    Thread Starter cdcidevel

    (@cdcidevel)

    8 years, 3 months ago

    @fiercegeek:

    Your comment really does not contribute to anything.

    If all you have ever needed was the free version, then any of those plugins would have worked for you. Well not Contact Form 7, there is no conditional logic there.

    This also means you’re doing only the simplest of forms, with nothing more than a simple email going out.

    With Caldera Forms, you HAVE to purchase an add-on to do something like emailing the form, in a formatted PDF. (Common for many plugins)

    You also need to purchase their middle or top offering to chain multiple page forms together based on logic and track user drop off. This is a promising feature to have conditional logic define the steps between a series of forms.

    You need to purchase their middle or top offer to use a payment gateway. For example Stripe or PayPal. Remember this is NOT a one-time purchase this is a monthly fee.

    So to use Stripe or PayPal it is $276 billed yearly. To use AuthorizeNet it is $600 annually.

    This is my point, with the middle plan you don’t even get to select your payment gateway. You get Stripe or PayPal. If you want the others you pay the $600 per year.

    Now with this pricing, you would think that Caldera Labs could actually read an email they receive and respond to that email with a response that actually has something to do with what was in the email.

    Canned responses for this pricing is beyond unacceptable, and now Josh wants even more money?

    Plugin Author Josh Pollock

    (@shelob9)

    8 years, 3 months ago

    If you’re looking for me to apologise for wanting to make money, I’m not going to.

    Our support for paying customers is really good and we put a ton of time into it. I’m not going to apologise for putting my limited time into providing support for those who make it possible for this plugin to exist for free for you to use.

    Thread Starter cdcidevel

    (@cdcidevel)

    8 years, 3 months ago

    @josh:

    You have completely missed the point of all this Josh and that is very sad.

    No one, including me, would ever try and take anything away from you for wanting to make a living.

    What the point was, well there was actually two…

    01) If you want to be the most expensive and the cream of the crop, you actually need to READ emails being sent to your company and answer what is being asked of you. I was prepared to slap down $400-$500 with your company until I got 3 canned answered in emails from you and Christine that has NOTHING to do with anything in my emails.

    You literally cut and pasted a response to my email, that had nothing at all to do with the pre-sales question. Not once, but >3< times!

    They are called “pre-sales questions”. I was not looking for free support, I was simply asking questions in regards to what I needed to purchase and if there was some flexibility in regards to it.

    If you really wish to continue this, I can post all the emails your company sent me in response to mine right here in this thread so everyone can see how you respond to “pre-sales” questions. Trust me, you don’t want this to go that far.

    02) If you’re going to bundle add-ons into package levels, you need to make all levels usable. You have add-ons that will naturally cause users to gravitate to your top tier package. The Pod and Query modules for example. You don’t need to force people to that tier by something so simple as AuthrorizeNet.

    Customers will upsell themselves over time with a quality product and this “superior” support you talk about.

    Actually, there is a 3rd.

    03) Trying to bundle your own version of “MailChimp” into your plugin, because you simply can’t fix the plugin to send out email…

    Then trying to blame the hosting company or the server the site is on. Passing the buck.

    When you pass the buck like this and blame others, it is a sign of the type of support one will get from your company.

    Summary:

    Josh I would have paid your price if your company would have taken 2 minutes to
    respond to pre-sales questions. Since your site is soooo poorly organized and laid out, to me, just my opinion, it is designed to hide from customers what they are actually getting.

    Good Day Josh and good luck to you.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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