When a license expires, the plugin will still continue to display your feeds as it did before your license expired, however, you will lose access to certain things:
- You will no longer receive plugin updates. If a major change occurs to either the social media platform your plugin uses, or to WordPress itself, which breaks functionality in the plugin then we preemptively release plugin updates ahead of time to protect you against these changes. Without a valid license, you would no longer be able to update the plugin to receive these updates, which may mean your existing version no longer continues to work as expected. It also means that you will no longer receive new features, enhancements, or bug fixes.
- You will no longer be able to receive plugin support. This means that if you have an issue with the plugin, you will no longer be able to contact our support team for help.
- You will no longer have access to the Pro settings in the plugin admin, after a 14 day grace period. Your feeds will continue to display and function as normal on your website, but you will not be able to change any Pro settings for existing feeds or use any Pro settings in any new feeds.
For these reasons, we strongly advise maintaining a valid license key for your plugin.
But what do I do if an older version of the plugin stops working?
This doesn’t happen very often, but if an older version of the plugin stops working due to a change in the social media API then you’d need to update the plugin in order to receive the necessary code changes to accommodate the social media update. Social media entities are continually updating their platform and changing things in their API, many of which are unforeseen, and so we have to update and change the plugin over time to adapt to these changes. As this requires ongoing time and cost to maintain then we require that users have a valid license key in order to keep receiving updates. Without doing this then unfortunately our business model would not be sustainable and we wouldn’t be able to keep maintaining the plugin at all due to the ever-increasing support burden and ongoing development cost.
We understand the frustration and apologize for any inconvenience. The ongoing changes in social media platforms and APIs add an extra layer of complexity to running a social media plugin business due to those ongoing necessary changes, when compared to a plugin that doesn’t rely on a 3rd-party service (for example a contact form plugin or a photo gallery plugin) which can be developed once and then will continue to work forever. We intend to be around for the long-haul to maintain and support our customers and so spend a lot of time on support and development to keep our plugins up to date and working smoothly, in order to avoid falling to the wayside and our products being abandoned like many other social media plugins are over time.
We hope you understand, and if you have any other questions at all then just let us know.
