Price hikes shouldn’t be a surprise
When a premium plugin raises its price, our Web Care clients hear it from us first, not from their credit card statement.
Most WordPress sites lean on a few paid plugins for things like event calendars, ticketing, forms, and backups. Those plugins renew automatically every year, and the companies behind them can change pricing whenever they like. If nobody is watching, the first sign of a big increase is a charge that’s suddenly several times higher than last year’s.
Web Care covers hosting, updates, and someone keeping close tabs on every piece of software your site runs on. That means security issues get patched quickly, and price changes reach you before they hit your bill.
What changed with The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar is one of the most popular event plugins for WordPress, and several of the sites we manage use its premium add-ons. It’s now owned by Nexcess, a brand of the hosting company Liquid Web.
Nexcess is folding individual add-on subscriptions like Events Calendar Pro, Event Tickets Plus, and Eventbrite Tickets into a single bundle called the “Nexcess Plugin Stack.” Existing subscriptions switch over automatically at their next renewal unless auto-renew is turned off.
The bundle runs about $350 per site per year. For a site that only needs one add-on, that can mean paying roughly four times what it paid before, for features it never asked for.
What we did about it
Within a day of spotting the change, we had checked every site we manage and personally contacted every affected client, months before any renewal hits.
- Audited every site. We ran a check across all of the roughly 70 websites under Web Care to find every Events Calendar add-on, whether it was active, whose license it ran on, and how much each site actually used it.
- Contacted each affected client. Every client with their own subscription got a personal email explaining the change, when it takes effect, and what their options are.
- Gave honest recommendations. For one client we suggested moving to the free version of the plugin and rebuilding the one premium feature they rely on. For a site that sells event tickets, we recommended simply renewing, because ticketing is more involved and stability matters more than the savings.
No one was pushed toward a project they didn’t need. Sometimes the right advice is “pay the increase,” and that’s fine. The point is that our clients get to decide with all the facts in front of them. And whatever decision they make, we are always by their side helping them wherever we can.
Why we work this way
Alliant Studios is an independent company, and that’s exactly why we’re always in our clients’ corner.
A lot of the WordPress world is now owned by private equity. Liquid Web, the company behind Nexcess and The Events Calendar, has been backed by private equity firms since 2015. When a company answers to investors, bundling and price increases are a predictable way to grow revenue.
We don’t have investors to answer to. We’re a small team based in Fairfax, Virginia, and our business depends on one thing: clients who trust us to look after their websites. So we treat every renewal, every plugin, and every invoice the way we’d want someone to treat our own.
Our goal is, and always will be, to look out for our Web Care clients’ best interests.
Want someone watching out for your site?
Web Care covers hosting, updates, security, and someone keeping an eye on the plugins and renewals your site depends on, so you hear about changes before they hit your bill.
If your current setup leaves you finding out about price increases after the fact, we’d love to talk. Reach out and tell us about your site.
