Ninja Forms Integration Bait-And-Switch…

[nlp commenter]

I just installed your plugin and created an account because you indicated that the Ninja Forms integration plugin was free, as shown here: https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/ninja-forms-and-wp-forms-integrations

“We just completed and made freely* available two new extensions which integrate two famous contact form plugins: Ninja Forms and WP Forms.” Oh…now I see the asterisk. “*for a limited period of time” (at the bottom of the page)

However, after installing the the “add-on manager” to get the plugin, it is obviously not free.

Why are you posting articles indicating that the plugin is free if it’s not free? (and obfuscating the fact that it is not free with a footnote that is easy to overlook — as I did)

I appreciate that you provide a free newsletter plugin and have to survive as developers, but beyond obfuscating the availability of the plugin, $65 for a single checkbox is too much…and it’s a function that should be free, as promised to your customers in the above link (barring the “limited time” period, which you also do not specify). I do not support the model of being forced to buy everything and a bunch of stuff I don’t need to get 1 minor feature.

[Stefano]

Hi, if you review the article https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/ninja-forms-and-wp-forms-integrations you can see the * on the free word with a note on bottom of the article. The addon has been available for many months for free. Now in order to start the sell of single addons (still not available) we make it part of the professional addons.

Stefano.

[nlp commenter]

I did read the article, missed the asterisk on my initial reading and built my integration under the assumption that the Ninja Form Integration was free. And, it bugs me, as you might infer. It is classic bait-and-switch through obfuscation and an intentionally misleading tactic. Why not be more transparent? If it’s not free, you could very clearly and easily indicate that it’s not free at the top of the article in a bold, perhaps colored font, with text that says something like:

“The Ninja Forms Integration plugin is no longer free. It is a premium plugin and part of the basic user subscription.” [link to the subscription]

Anyway – the obfuscation doesn’t matter at this point. I wrote my own integration plugin for it this morning. $65 is too much to support a single “subscribe” checkbox on a Ninja Form, as stated above. I might have been willing to spend $5 on it, but forcing users to pay a high price for a bunch of stuff they will probably never use to get a single, extremely basic function is not an appealing offer from the consumer side.

ps. I have noticed a couple of things in my initial use.
1. When you unsubscribe, the page shows a link to re-activate, but there is no unsubscribe link in the reactivation confirmation email and the previous unsubscribe links have been invalidated (since the user unsubscribed). So, if you resubscribe and don’t manually capture the link, the only way to unsubscribe again is at the next mailing. The reactivation email should include an updated unsubscribe link. It’s true that unsubscribe-resubscribe-unsubscribe is not very likely, but the correct link should always be present in the latest user action confirmation email so that the user can take action without intervention from the administrator.

2. “Send Now” for Newsletters still relies on cron. My expectation upon hitting “Send Now” was that the mail would be sent immediately directly via the php mailer. Instead, I had to unblock the auth on my site and manually run cron/refresh pages to get the Newsletter queue to empty. Send Now should immediately do the send via php without requiring cron.

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