Over the past 12 months the demand for support has increased beyond belief. In a lot of ways this is great as it means more people than ever are using our products but it’s starting to have an impact on the product, and my own personal life.
For those that don’t know, Property Hive is ran by just me. Just one guy who does everything you see before you; support, development, blog posts etc etc. I started Property Hive because I wanted to build a great product that would benefit the community and give developers a great tool when building an estate agency website. At the moment though I’m spending every minute of my day trying to keep everyone happy on support whilst the product isn’t developing anywhere near as fast as I’d like it to, if at all.
As an example of this, there used to be a Property Hive release going out every week. Now I’m lucky to get one out once a month.
Things need to change else long term I don’t see a future for Property Hive.
As a result of the above, I’ve taken the decision to completely close our support desk from the 15th October to 22nd October. During this time there will be zero support. Unless your request is absolutely business critical and you have a license key, I won’t take a look at it until my return.
During this downtime I will be working on a few things:
Improved Template Assistant Add On
– Questions about how to integrate Property Hive in a custom theme, or how to make changes to the layouts is by far the hottest topic on support. I’ll be looking to add better support for changing layouts and colours/sizes etc to our existing Template Assistant add on to give you more control and reduce the number of support queries relating to this.
Improved Documentation
– We already updated our docs a few months ago but there’s still more to be done here.
Changes To Support Channels
– Support will no longer be available by email. We’ll be introducing a brand new support suite which people with license keys can submit questions to. This allows us to track the history of a request in one place, and ensure that people are getting the response times they deserve.
Only users with a license key will be able to submit questions to this support suite. For users without a license key, they will be directed to the WordPress forum and asked to post questions on the public forum there. Not only does this allow someone else to answer, but also means you might find your question has been asked before and find the answer on an existing thread.
Changes To Product Pricing
– We’ve always priced everything as one-off. Going forward, from 22nd October when we come back online any new purchases will be changed annually. We’re still finalising the pricing structure but it’s likely we’ll have some of Premium/Pro package that contains all of the add ons with a recurring annual fee attached to it. This will only effect purchases going forward. If you’ve made a purchase in the past you will not suddenly be charged annually.
We are constantly striving to improve Property Hive and we feel that addressing our high volumes of support enquiries will enable us to ensure the longevity of our product, offer better support to those that have paid for it, and get back on track with building cool new features that will benefit everyone.
As soon as we are back online we’ll announce the new changes so watch this space.
