Hey Iain!
I hope you got the email I sent you this morning through your website. If not, let me know what email address is best and I will send it direct.
We try really hard to keep on top of all the addons out there, and are certainly aware of your work (obviously with Taxonomy and NavEE being such similar beasts). But for whatever reason, with the signal to noise ratio as it currently stands, we genuinely missed ‘Plates. As you said, they absolutely do very similar things, with a few exceptions from what I can see.
We have a bunch of other stuff planned for Better Pages in the near future, but as an agile shop (and in thinking that we had this great new idea) we wanted to get the core functionality out as soon as possible! 😊 So, hopefully, once we build the additional functionality into Better Pages the features sets won’t be so close.
As for the pricing, again, I apologize. The very last thing we meant to do was devalue your (or our) addon. Our intention was to give users the ability to try it out at a discounted rate rather than having to blow the full price on something they weren’t sure if they needed. This way, as new project come up - they would be familiar with how handy it can be.
Anyway - thanks for responding here. As I mentioned in my email this morning, the last thing I want to do is have there be any confusion about our intentions with this addon - or to have any bad blood between developers. We are a pretty small company, in a relatively small group of addon devs out there, and we support all of them all the time. In fact, for every EE install we build, we probably spend more on addons than we do on the core!
I sent you my phone number and email address in that message this morning - and I would be more than happy to chat about this in person (well, not on email) if there are any things you feel aren’t resolved. The EE community is really awesome, and we really want to remain a positive part of that community.
Michael Witwicki
Michael,
I’m totally fine with some healthy competition in the EE marketplace, it’s good for EE and it’s good for developers.
What has raised my eyebrow is the add-on is functionally identical to mine, and you’ve canon blasted a $1 sale. Essentially striking any value out of both add-ons for the foreseeable future (eg folks buying 10 licenses).
I don’t sell many add-ons, 2 in fact out of the dozen or so I’ve given to the community. ‘Plates has returned my time investment in making it, so open sourcing it is pretty much what’s left to do now.
Iain.