I would appreciate some of your opinions on the issue of renewing the Upgrade Subscription Plan the cost of which is now $110.00. We seem to have reached a pinacle in several ares with the responsive design, optimized caching, JavaScript code moved to the bottom of page, blog and lots more.
Do you think there are many more improvements to be made to justify the $110.00 yearly cost? I am quite happy with this latest edition of 4.3.3 and feel that anything more I need can be done on a customized as needed basis. But am afraid to pull the plug on the Upgrade Subscription Plan. What do you think? Appreciate any feedback.
If you have a decent store that's making sales, $110/year is peanuts for upgrades.
Hi Kingsleypress,
Yea, it is. But the upgrade process has been so awful all these years with lost sales and bugs. The response from tech support has grown longer and longer. The last upgrade it took two weeks of PayPal being down and reverting twice during which I lost all previous customer info and in the end I could not make the upgrade to I think it was 4.2.4. I swore off upgrading further but the new features were too hard to resist so I finally paid Ecom Labs to perform my upgrade and install my responsive theme and they are great so it went well. I'm just thinking what more can be done that would justify more upgrades? Maybe I'll just stay at 4.3.3 and never upgrade again. The speed is great and its all I need. So we'll see. Thanks for the feedback.
I tell my clients they should update to every other main cscart release. There seems to be 2 - 4 years between every other major update. I generally let my clients license expire during this time frame. For example, I went from 1.3.5 to 3.06 for one client and 2.2.1 to 4.3.3 for another. During that time frame I maintain their sites and never use cs-cart support. Everything remains stable and they can focus on selling products. I do not like to play the upgrade game, if it ain't broke I don't fix it.
Then after 2 - 3 years we start looking at upgrading.
[quote name='philr' timestamp='1438777499' post='225732']
Hi Kingsleypress,
I'm just thinking what more can be done that would justify more upgrades?
[/quote]
Things will always be improving. Bill Gates is reported to have said: “640 KB is more memory than anyone will ever need,” LOL
That sounds like some good advice Triplets, thank you. And I hear you kingsleypress, that's what concerns me with staying in one version. I think Triplets has some good advice though. Just to give you guys an idea, I just asked InMotion Hosting to upgrade my PhP and MySQL and the website was shut down for a number of hours before I caught it because the HTTPS was not working. So I think a couple of years with no upgrades will do my blood pressure good! Thanks guys.
You get some support credits with the upgrade prolongation too. So the $110/year for some support and access to bug fixes/new versions is a drop in the bucket.
All is good until you need something like changes that affect PCI/DSS compliance (note in 2016, all sites that handle CC data will need to have penetration testing done quarterly) or other industry changes like PHP versions, etc. Also note that our friends at Google keep adding requirements to rankings like mobile friendly, etc. So I would expect the industry to continually change and your storefront software (your main sales channel) should change along with it.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1438817507' post='225806']
You get some support credits with the upgrade prolongation too. So the $110/year for some support and access to bug fixes/new versions is a drop in the bucket.
[/quote]
Hello, everybody, just a quick notice to avoid possible misunderstanding: according to our upgrade policy, no free technical support credits are provided together with upgrade subscription.
Sorry to misspeak. I was conveying what a client had told me. I never really look at my balance so assumed what they had said was true.
Thanks for the clarification. But still, $110/yr for the main sales mechanism for a business is still a drop in the bucket.